Re: ApplicationManagement interface

On Tuesday, 5 March 2013 at 17:58, Jonas Sicking wrote:

> 
> On Mar 4, 2013 3:01 AM, "Marcos Caceres" <w3c@marcosc.com (mailto:w3c@marcosc.com)> wrote:
> > 
> > Hi,
> > I'm wondering if we really need to standardise the "ApplicationManagement interface"? That interface is not developer facing. From what I understand, that interface would be used by user agents internally to manage applications. Hence, that seems like an implementation detail - so I'm not really getting why we should standardise it?
> > 
> > Instead, we should just standardise the life cycle events that would be generated from the functionality that the ApplicationManagement interface provides (and reflect those events as system messages as appropriate). 
> At least in Firefox OS it is as exposed to developers as the Telephony API is. I.e. both are certified-only APIs and only used by built-in apps. Currently it's used by the homescreen app to render the grid of applications. It is also used by the settings app to allow configuring and (soon) for getting metadata for all applications.

Right, this is precisely the use case and (security/legally imposed) limitations I was thinking about. 
> Exposing the API to privileged apps that have enumerated the permission in their manifest *might* be OK too.
> I'd be fine with moving the API to a separate spec though. If not we should very clearly indicate which security level is needed for the API, as we always should for sensitive APIs.
> 

Agreed. But it would be good to hear from other potential implementers here: 

* is there an expectation that, for instance, one could *potentially* "transplant" the privileged application management interface that Jonas described above from one runtime to another? 

* Will any other runtime manage their application lifecycle via JS as FxOS does?

I see a use case for having this as a standardised API in cases where, for instance, OEMs wanted to customise home screens that were able to run on different runtimes. But, like I said, the target audience for the API is pretty small. 

Anyway, that's my 2c :) 

-- 
Marcos Caceres
http://datadriven.com.au

Received on Tuesday, 5 March 2013 18:34:07 UTC