Generating Dynamic web pages without server side scripting

Question

I am trying to control a media device which has lot of multimedia content that it can play using another device(remote control device) like an ipad connected to the LAN. (UPnP)

I want the media device to be able to send the content listing to the remote device so that it will be rendered as a webpage on the remote controller. And actions on the webpages needs to be sent to the the device as commands to execute (like play, pause, next etc). The media device is an embedded device, hence can't have any server side scripting, all has to be done on the client side.

I want the page rendered to be HTML5. So, is it possible to generate dynamic HTML5 pages using just client side scripting?

Thanks a lot.

I am an embedded systems developer hence clueless about the web designing stuff.

Answer 1

Yes, this is possible. I work at Plex, and we have a similar need. Our Plex Media Server is a bunch of C++ software that doesn't build web pages or anything like that, it just serves static files and has API endpoints for controlling media.

I built a media manager that allows configuring the system (but not playback as of now, but the principle is the same) using a web page that is totally static. In fact, we use Cappuccino, which is essentially a JavaScript-only way of building a web page (there's essentially just enough html and css to bootstrap the Cappuccino environment). It uses Ajax to hit the C++ API to do anything else it needs to do.

You might try something similar, but it by no means needs to be Cappuccino - you can do it perfectly well with jQuery, HTML, and CSS.