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I'm looking at a Windows Executable that I like. I would like to be able to access it via my google phone. So, I want to put the executable into a website and load that website in my phone to operate the program from my phone. My Web Server is on Linux (ubuntu). I'm using Apache, PHP, and MySQL. So, I think that I would need to use WINE to get the executable running on Ubuntu and then somehow need to pipe the visual elements or the program itself into a webpage. Is this practical? Is this possible? If not, are there any alternatives?

Wolfpack'08
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  • Not that way it's not. There are some VNC widgets that can be embedded into web pages, mostly in Java. Otherwise, the web is a very different environment from a normal executable. – geekosaur Apr 26 '12 at 06:01

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I'm not sure what level of development experience is but nothing about what you're describing sounds impossible. Setting up a HTTP polling mechanism which grabs the latest screenshot of the application and then using an image map to translate your clicks back to the server all are perfectly plausible endeavors. I can't speak to how well it would function obviously.

I'd encourage you to try regardless. Even if it doesn't work I'm sure the community would love to see an open source project that attempts this and employers eat this kind of thing up if you whip it out during an interview. I'd be floored if a job candidate came in talking about how they attempted something like this so personally I say go for it.

Spencer Ruport
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  • Would you please help me find an example? Give me some kind of baring as to which languages I should be using? Am I just taking a screenshot with a program and then uploading the screenshot to a packages directory? Then piping the media packages to some kind of intepretation output, like a image-to-text .py script? And then throwing the text out based on the img-to-text .py script's interpretation down the line? I think I could do it with pixel recognition.... I mean... does that sound right, to you? – Wolfpack'08 Apr 26 '12 at 06:22
  • I don't have a lot of experience working in Linux environments so I'm afraid I can't help you much there. Given the openness of the operating system however I'd be willing to bet you could find some code that's capable of capturing pixels from a program window. – Spencer Ruport Apr 26 '12 at 06:52
  • I can do the pixel capture. I'm more worried about the media capture. I know how to grep from a website but not from a program t hat requires x. "Polling" sounds like the thing for me, or "long polling". I think that I need to isolate the regions I'd like to extract from, first. – Wolfpack'08 Apr 26 '12 at 07:10
  • As expected, websockets seems to be the current way. – Wolfpack'08 Apr 26 '12 at 08:53
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This would certainly be an interesting project to work on, and I'd certainly urge you to see this through.

It's definitely possible to implement this, from what I recall there's definitely C API's for the VNC library, so while your starting point is a web page with a view of the running application, you could have a webservice deployed somewhere that uses the VNC library API's for both viewing and controlling the application, the web page could then be updated with a bitmap/png image which should be straight forward enough to generate. Being a web service it could take http requests from your original web page so is completely controllable.

display101
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  • Yeah, I think that VNC protocol would be useful. I'm not sure if I can use VNC protocol for audio capture or not, though? – Wolfpack'08 Apr 26 '12 at 08:54