Networked Service Discovery and Messaging - first draft published

We've just published a first draft of the 'Networked Service Discovery 
and Messaging' specification to the W3 Mercurial repository. Firstly, 
thank you to everyone who has helped us get to this point - AKA, the 
starting line.

It is the result of collaboration between Opera Software, members of the 
CableLabs initiative and the W3C Web & TV Interest Group over the past 
year. At the current time of writing there are currently 3 
implementations (and counting) based on early drafts of this proposal: a 
Webkit prototype implementation, an Opera prototype implementation and a 
Chrome Extension-based implementation.

The latest draft of this spec is available @

http://w3c-test.org/dap/discovery-api/

This API represents a minimal viable framework for discovering, 
requesting and creating connections with HTTP-based services running on 
local devices that are advertised in the user's current local network 
via one or more common discovery protocols (e.g. SSDP and mDNS/DNS-SD).

Once a user has authorized access to any specific service(s) then they 
are able to communicate with those services via a service's advertised 
control url endpoint (exposed at service.url). The spec describes how 
this URL is whitelisted in a 'reverse-CORS' way on user authorization to 
temporarily allow cross-origin communication to happen from the current 
web page to that service via existing web APIs such as XHR or Web Sockets.

A number of use cases have been documented in the specification. The use 
cases generally under consideration revolve around scenarios such as 
being able to interact and control a wide-range of devices in the home 
(TVs, Music Players, Home Automation Systems, etc), share media and 
other content between home devices and enable web application developers 
to implement second screen experiences for their users directly in web 
browsers via standard web technologies.

We would like to shortly make a start on producing a comprehensive 
conformance test suite to evaluate existing and future implementations 
against this specification. To this end we would like to issue a CfC to 
publish a First Public Working Draft of this specification. I believe 
this is what was agreed to at this groups most recent F2F meeting. The 
chairs will be issuing a CfC for this specification in the coming weeks.

It is now open season on discussion of this spec on this mailing list. 
We would really like input from both implementers and end-users alike at 
this point. I know a number of people had comments they wanted to share 
here and now would be a great time to do that.

Best regards,

-- 
Rich Tibbett
Opera Software ASA
http://www.opera.com/

Received on Friday, 3 August 2012 12:34:19 UTC