We have published a new version of the Food Allergy Checker web form application that integrates a barcode scanner to ease data entry when searching for food products.  The barcode scanner is implemented client side in javascript.  We evaluated a couple of scanner packages that are implemented using javascript.  The one we chose for our application is an open source package that works with the top browsers including browsers on mobile devices such as Safari on iOS platform.

The package is found on github at https://serratus.github.io/quaggaJS/.  Adding this package to our web application was fairly straightforward.  This scanner software is configurable to scan several barcode formats including UPC format common in U.S. market place for food products.  The effort for integrating this package with our web application took less than a full work day for one software engineer thanks to the excellent example page that is part of the github download.  Special thanks to Christoph Oberhofer for his work on the example code which was largely used in our web application.

To see the changes to our Food Allergy Checker go to this link https://horvathsoftware.com/FoodDatabaseApplication.aspx.  Thanks for giving our web applications a try and for reading this post!