Re: intents broker == user agent ?

On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 21:56:31 +0100, Greg Billock <gbillock@google.com>  
wrote:

> There's a difference between ensuring that there's a way to
>> communicate (which should be covered here), and ensuring a requirement
>> for a specific transport.
>>
>
> Yes. As we've discussed elsewhere, there's nothing in the API proposal to
> forbid returning a persistent connection handle (MessagePort), allowing  
> the
> client and service to exchange further messages. (And in fact we hope  
> that
> ends up facilitating a wide range of use cases.) But it leaves the issue  
> of
> what protocol is exchanged over such a channel unspecified.
>
> I think what Paul is suggesting is that if there are particular protocol
> translations or definitions to establish for that which would be helpful,
> they not be in scope for the Web Intents API, but be considered  
> separately.

I agree with the statement that a detailed work on the messaging protocol  
can be discussed separately.
But I also think that most of the people that will look at this second  
step will probably share 90% of the issues.
So I was wondering if it could make sense to at least explore the options  
and try to come up with some recommendations/best practices.
Of course this doesn't necessarily needs to be done here, but I would say  
it should be done by one group (maybe DAP?).
And the joint effort is not about writing a universal protocol but sharing  
experiences on how different protocol can be built on top of intents to  
try to converge to similar design patterns.


> That would also allow them to be composed more generally with other
> mechanisms we may dream up in the future to establish, share, or persist
> messaging channels in the web platform. If we decide that Web Intents is  
> a
> good API to establish such channels, that would be great, and perhaps
> reduces the size of the problem to be solved (or rather, more fruitfully
> segments it).
>
> More generally, this connection discovery mechanism allows us to envision
> a new class of web applications which could exploit protocol translations
> for MessageChannel (i.e. FTP, SSH, JDBC).

could you expand on this? what do you mean by "protocol translations for  
MessageChannel"

> Some cursory looking around
> didn't show any W3C effort around this; perhaps UPNP is a good place to
> start. :-) (I know very little about it.)

well the W3C web&tv IG is interested in this, but is just an IG, we need a  
WG to do some actual work :)

-- 
Giuseppe Pascale
TV & Connected Devices
Opera Software

Received on Friday, 25 November 2011 09:03:09 UTC