Web based Freehand Drawing

dparsons · December 1st, 2005, 10:03 AM

Greetings all,
I am trying to port a desktop application that I wrote over to a web based version but am at kind of a loss. Essentially I have a Freehand drawing application that I want to embed into a web form; this is as simple as creating a custom control and dropping it onto my form. Now, in my desktop application I can monitor the MouseMovements realtime because the program executes on my Machine, what is the best practice to do this via the web?

My first inclanation was to use Javascript to capture the mouse points and post those points back to the control but you can imagine the amount of round trips that would be needed to draw even the most rudementary of objects.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how this might accomplished?

"The one language all programmers understand is profanity."

planoie · December 3rd, 2005, 11:20 AM

Here's a case where "some desktop applications aren't meant to live online".

You could certainly do this with javascript (a lot of javascript). Like you point out however is the problem of pushing the data for the drawing actions back to the server.

1. You could look into remote scripting which would allow the client side of the application to push/pull data to/from the server without the need to postbacks. This has some limitations however.
2. Alternatively, you could maintain all the drawing information on the client side and provide a means to save the data that can be done just once with a button click.

If you need to get the draw data to your server, you could always go with a lightweight desktop application that the user would download off the website which talks to the server thru web services. This of course would require the user to have the .NET framework installed. But like I said earlier, some types of programs just aren't well suited for the web.

-Peter