Re: local device discovery - api, demo and source code

Hi Dave,

I'm wondering if these local device scans could done whenever a
Customer page makes an Introducer request. The browser would create a
corresponding Provider for each attached device that it finds. If this
was done, then a Customer page could make an Introducer request for a
file-service. The Provider selection menu shown to the user would
include both cloud-based services and USB and other devices attached
to the local computer at that moment. The user could then select one
of these local devices to service the Customer's request. In either
case, the Customer page would then communicate with the user selected
service via a MessageChannel and so could exchange arbitrary data with
a local device. By doing this via the Introducer, we get a secure
click from the user that indicates consent for the Customer page to
access the selected local device.

Does that sound appealing?

--Tyler

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 8:10 AM, Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>



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Received on Tuesday, 12 April 2011 19:49:18 UTC