local device discovery - api, demo and source code

I have been working with Samsung in the EU webinos project and have
developed a demo of enabling browsers to discover local devices and
services via the local area network, Bluetooth and USB. The demo
involves a JavaScript object that allows you to invoke a variety of
discovery services (multicast DNS, SSDP, SLP, Bluetooth and USB). These
call back to methods on the object with information on each
device/service they discover.  The demo is available as open source
under the Apache2 license, but is currently limited to Linux based
systems, for more details, please see:

      http://www.w3.org/2011/04/discovery.html

In case you are wondering how this relates to Web Introducers[1], the
above work is about discovering local devices and services. What devices
do you have at home? What devices are there when you visit a friend's
house? Devices can be switched on or off, and many are portable, so the
availability of devices is time dependent. By contrast, Web Introducer
is essentially a brokering mechanism for web page scripts to locate
cloud based services and as such the two are complementary.

Consumer electronics embed low level discovery protocols, and as a
result support for these protocols is very widely deployed. The aim is
to expose these protocols in an easy to use way for web page scripts, so
that web developers can create applications that span devices.

[1] http://web-send.org/introducer/

-- 
 Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

Received on Tuesday, 12 April 2011 15:10:23 UTC