The founder of Agranat Systems examines the design issues involved in engineering effective Web technologies for embedded systems. W eb browsers have become the de facto standard user interface to a variety of applications. System designers are therefore using them to supplement or replace traditional proprietary command-line and graphical user interfaces.
Web interfaces offer benefits to manufacturers as well as to end-users.
Moreover, the costs associated with product support, training, and documentation are lower, and the Web interface can be used for remote diagnostics of products in the field. As with the Web in general, Web pages from the embedded system are transmitted to the Web browser, which implements the user interface. Some of these pages are unchanging and can be stored in the embedded system. In other cases, the embedded system dynamically generates the pages to convey the current device state to the user. End-users can also use Web browsers to send information to the embedded system for configuration and control of the device.