)
To handle these tasks, you can often write a tiny server that uses proprietary extensions
directly on the Windows server and then serve it up in an open, easy-to-use format,
such as XML. This lets the work of accessing proprietary Windows libraries stay on the
Windows machine, so you don??™t need to use potentially buggy open source drivers
designed to access proprietary code. (Of course, some open source drivers designed to
access proprietary code are very good, and in those cases, you might not need an intermediary.)
nTip At times, the opposite approach works well. For example, you could write an XML feed on your Linux
server that is read by a client-side Windows application, which then uses COM to automatically open
Microsoft Word or Microsoft Access to insert the data. This way, you don??™t need to generate Word or Access
documents by hand, which is problematic when it??™s even possible at all. You get the entire benefit of
Microsoft Office without writing any custom Word or Access output code, and your clients get data in a
familiar format that they can manipulate.
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