Re: Request for interested participants in an Health & Welness Web Apps W3C community group

On 29/06/11 19:43, Micheil Smith wrote:
> I don't know too much on the specifics of hardware APIs, but what about a standard
> way to communicate to bluetooth/usb devices from the browser?
>
> I'd imagine that it'd require binary support in the browsers (ByteArray), but then you
> could implement all the parsing and protocol specific stuff at user level, outside of
> the standard api definitions.
>
> This is sort of what we at pusher.com do with WebSockets, we provide an API on top
> that sets up things like channels and implements an event style protocol on top of the
> websocket protocol. This works really well because then you can have another service
> that implements our subprotocol and can then hook into our service.
>
> I feel this sort of pattern would work quite well for a bluetooth / usb API.

In the EU webinos project we are looking into web overlay models for 
discovery and messaging with devices with a view to applications for 
home networking. I built a NPAPI plugin to discover services over mDNS, 
SSDP (UPnP), SLP, Bluetooth and USB, see:

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

The next step will be to add mechanisms to locate and run service 
drivers matching a given service. These would be a mix of native code 
libraries plus scripts.  The aim is to allow third party components to 
support a simplified scripting model for use by regular web application 
developers.  Of course, security, trust and privacy are very important 
issues here, and are key goals for webinos. I am looking at running the 
plugin and the service drivers in a separate security context, e.g. a 
Firefox addon or Chrome extension. Applications wanting access to these 
services would need to get user consent, just as is the case today with 
access to geolocation. That is however, just the starting point for a 
discussion on stronger mechanisms for security and privacy for web 
applications as we strive to enable developers to create compelling new 
multi-device applications that fulfill the need for strong security and 
privacy.

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

Received on Thursday, 30 June 2011 08:58:08 UTC