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Google Developing Master API — Web Intents
GeneralSecretary writes "Google is developing an API to allow web apps to easily share information with various services. Quoting: 'Android OS addresses this problem with Intents, a facility for late run-time binding between components in the same or different applications. In the Intents system, the client application requests a generic action, e.g. share, and specifies the data to pass to the selected service application. The user is given a list of applications which have registered that they can handle the requested intent. The user-selected application is created in a new context and passed the data sent from the client, the format of which is predefined for each specific intent type. We are hard at work designing an analogous system for the web: Web Intents. This web platform API will provide the same benefits of Android Intents, but better suited for web application. ... As with Android, Web Intents documents an initial set of intent actions (edit, view, share, etc.) that likely cover the majority of use cases on the web today; however, as the web grows and sites provide more functionality, new intent actions will be added by services that document these intents, some more popular than others. To foster development and use of intents, we plan to create a site to browse existing intents and add new intents.'"
Yea, in the same way that following a specific ABI in your C magically tracks your users...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Google seems to be proposing a bit of javascript that anyone can add to their website,
which will pull my data from any other enabled website I've stored information on?
Why does this just seem like another entry point for abuse?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I don't see anything here that permits Google to track you any more than they already do.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
One API to rule them all, One API to find them, One API to bring them all, And in the darkness bind them.
I might be missing something, but how is it significantly different from the work on languages such as WSDL used to describe Web Services? Is this just a JavaScript/REST version of the same?
Thanks,
-A
"- What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"- You ask a glass of water."[from h2g2]
Maybe I don't have all of my brain cells firing this morning -- or maybe it's because I'm not a software developer -- but I don't have a clue what this API will actually allow people to do in real life if developers use it. Can someone explain in it in simple terms? Thanks.
The C ABI is not even remotely analogous to what Google is doing here.
We need a truly open mobile platform with truly open applications written to act in the best interests of their users, not for the bottom line of their corporate controllers.
Unfortunately, that's impossible in the current climate. No business will do this because there's no money in it. No group of programmers can just decide to do it either because they have day jobs to worry about and won't want to spend all their leisure time working just to churn out something that won't be up to the level Android is. What we would need to accomplish this (among other more important goals) is an economy that doesn't rely on the profit motive the function.
And if Google's C ABI required submitting all function arguments to Google...
Google works very hard to make submitting things to them very easy, to the point where you dont even realize any submission is happening, this just greases the rails a little more.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Exactly. My "Intents" are that Google pisses the fuck off.
Your intents are making you rather intense
He seems to be incensed, as evidenced by his intense intents
The intents model of Android is pretty cool and solves a lot of problems for Android, but I'm not sure how often it would apply on the web. It would be very useful for posting to Twitter, Facebook, etc from any site that uses intents I suppose. For me the lack of intents is one of the big problems with iOS. In early versions they built in FaceBook support. In v5 they built in Twitter support. Will they need to release a new version for Google+ support? Seems like a pretty serious design flaw (intentional or not). This may be another of Google's pushes they seem to be doing to make things more open.
Intents is one of the best and most powerful parts of the Android platform, and one that is often overlooked when comparing to iOS.
In pretty much any Android application under the sun, you can hit "Share" from a menu or button somewhere. When you do that, whatever data you have in that app posts a message to android saying "Hey, I want to share this (image/jpg or text/xml or application/octet-stream)... and any other application on the system that is registered to handle that intent's mime type will show up as something to share to.
This is what lets you share videos from anywhere on the phone not only to YouTube, but also to Picassa, DropBox, SMB, Email, or any other app that says they can handle videos or binary files.
It's a really powerful and flexable application cross-commnication system, that makes all kinds of otherwise disconnected third-party applications work together seemlessly for the user. For example, I can "Share" my PhotoStich images with my Dropbox, directly inside the application.... and none of the PhotoStitch or Dropbox developers had to talk to each other to make that happen.
That's why you use industry standard libraries like jquery or yui which will hide all the nasty implementation details of various platforms from you and make it simple to develop. Only a few dozen people ever need to be bothered by the low level APIs.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
And one Master API to bind them all. Ok so it's not really funny but I'm in a goofy mood today.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
Cool. Please describe one with enough detail that we can ascertain that it will work. Also, if it's an abstract concept with no analogue in the world, please provide a detailed migration plan that will avoid mass destruction as a probable side effect.
That way the client can open up the app that created it or something else that can
ROFLMAO.... Funny, I've written a handful of jQuery extensions, just to work around certain issues, and knowing about the nasty implementation details was necessary. It's generally a good idea to understand what goes on underneath. I've had several times where understanding threading, and pointers has helped even when working on improving the performance of C# based applications. Developers who don't understand under the covers make stupid choices in ignorance. I don't like working close to the metal, I'm not that good with C, assembly, C++ etc... though having at least a general understanding helps a lot in developing applications in higher level languages.
The same is very true with JavaScript, and especially with platforms like NodeJS and MongoDB gaining in popularity (yeah, I'm a fan). Not understanding that string concatenation is far slower in most cases than array joins can be a huge difference (not as much in V8, as it does a better job in compilation, but still).
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
In the mid 90s when the internet was competing against the paywalled gardens of Compuserve, AOL and the like, I distinctly remember sensible business people asking the quite reasonable question "Why will the internet ever amount to anything other than a university system for public sector communications? If noone is willing to pay for anything they see online, then noone makes any money, and nothing ever gets built.". The answer, as far as I remember was always that advertising would pay for the internet. That our eyeballs are valuable enough for people to put up the money to put up the infrastructure to engage our eyeballs on behalf of their advertisers. Nothing has changed. The advertising company is putting up the money for the infrastructure and giving it away for the price of eyeballs, that is the economic bargain we all entered into.
Korma: Good
you will be just as stuffed as you were when you had all those lines of code which relied on Microsoft apps.
From TFA:
Mozilla is also actively exploring this problem space. In fact weâ(TM)re working closely with Mozilla engineers to unify our two proposals into one simple, useful API. Visit the examples page to try out the feature in any current browser. To explore using the API in your site, check out out the JavaScript shim, which provides an implementation of the API for browsers that have not implemented this feature.
So, not only are they working with Mozilla to standardize the API but they are creating a javascript shim for other browsers to play along too. Thanks for the daily dose of FUD though!
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Yes it is.
great.... this has potential of bloat written all over.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Well, the most logical thing would be to have the browser handle it, and if there's a request type unknown to the browser, allow to search for it with a provider of your choice. That provider would be just a specialized search engine seeking for handlers instead of generic web pages, and it could be done by every search engine provider.
Of course it this matches what Google has in mind is another question.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
this hasn't been patented already.
A "Master API"? What device does that interface to, a universal controller?
A better way in my opinion would be for the application launching the intent to "suggest" an adequate service, so if you didn't have any appropriate handler the browser could ask if you wanted to use that.
Dilbert RSS feed
How so?
which will hide all the nasty implementation details of various platforms from you and make it simple to develop.
Yes, make it simple to develop shitty, inefficient apps because the "programmers" who bawww over actually having to learn how things work write absolutely abysmal code.
I wonder if Mozilla is involved?
Mozilla is also actively exploring this problem space. In fact we’re working closely with Mozilla engineers to unify our two proposals into one simple, useful API.
Is that FOSS enough for you? because I would think that the Chrome team is part of the FOSS community, but you apparently do not.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Simple: it should rely on peer recognition. Plus, we give money to people with peer recognition.
-- --
So wanting efficient programs and competent programmers writing them makes me elitist? Did I travel to the bizarro world?
Seriously. I am seeing so much of this lately...an attempt to put Google into the same box as Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle. The fact is that those companies represent a different era in business models and within the tech community. Google is as much a social reaction the state of affairs on the tech scene when they came into existence as they are a technological one. They saw the issues created by the companies before them and developed their approaches to those issues before they got big enough to apply to them. With one sentence, "don't be evil" they passed judgment on those who had come before them and pledged an idealogical stance (as opposed to a technological one). In addition to that, their chosen problem (to make the knowledge of world accessible and usable while solving the problem of online reputation and trust) is as much (or more) social and philosophical as technological.
This essential difference in stance and approach comes with its own problems. I am *not* saying that Google is some sort of corporate saint. What I am saying is that these issues that arise with other companies (such as the mentioned issues with Microsoft libraries, languages, frameworks, and even IDEs) just don't apply to the way Google has been going about things.
That said, I do think that a good programmer needs to understand and be able to cope with those "nasty implementation details". It's an easy way to write really bad code if you have no clue how the methods you're using work. However, on a day to day coding basis, libraries, frameworks, code generation, and autocompletion/intellisense help speed up development a great deal. As long as you understand what these shortcuts are doing, there is nothing wrong with abstracting away from and hiding the implementation methods, and you won't end up "stuffed" by using *anyone's* tools. There is no danger in learning C# and .NET and using Visual Studio to code apps using them. The danger is learning to use VS and thinking that means you really know C# (or C++ for that matter).
"We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be." - Joss Whedon via Angel