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WebAPI: Mozilla Proposes Open App Interface For Smartphones
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has an idea for how it can bridge the gap between native apps and web applications: WebAPI will be developed as a set of HTML5 APIs and deliver consistent, web-based application interfaces that can be accessed by any HTML5-capable device, specifically smartphones."
Yay! More API sprawl! Just what we wanted!
I am disappoint. What I really want to know is how big the version number will be. Can we expect the release of WebAPI to start at 11.0?
Fear is the mind killer.
Fuck you.
I know I shouldn't be replying to spam, but I couldn't help but laugh at this:
Feeling crushed, drained, and depressed, I became a mere shell of what I once was.
Really? All this over a virus? I can't decide if I should feel sorry for the "marketing guy" that came up with that line, or wish that he should be shot.
How we can completely cancel out any battery life improvements of the last 10 years.
over the death of webOS again.
Not that this is overlap, but wasn't part of the point of webOS that the UIs were HTML, thus streamlining the presentation layer?
Yeah, I'm sure Apple will get right onto that.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Yeah like Apple and Microsoft will adopt this... Mozilla's altruism, while nice to see, is always misguided and unrealistic.
Man, Mozilla, as a mobile web developer, I wish the best for you, but get ready for disappointment.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Yes.
$300 is less than a days pay for any professional programmer.
Not all people are in a financial position to move to a place with a high concentration of employers willing to pay a professional programmer $300 per day. They have to start it as a hobby and build it up into a profession in order to build a portfolio to show to employers. They also need some source of income on which to relocate and live while seeking a job, and that source of income might not pay $300 per day.
(which is mostly inflated since you add a bunch of artificial costs that are not absolutely necessity for iOS development)
What might those artificial costs be? The $99 per year for a certificate is unavoidable outside the underground jailbreak-only ecosystem. People have criticized me for adding the price of a Mac, claiming that someone would have bought a computer anyway. So instead, I added the rough difference in price between a MacBook Air and a Windows 7 Home Premium license on the one hand and what someone would have bought otherwise (a midrange laptop that comes with Windows 7 Home Premium) on the other hand.
I also find it funny that he refuses to pay $65 to the virus creator but has no beef paying for the scam that is MyCleanPC.
Javascript would be a tolerable language for a smaller user base, but the official scripting language for web pages should be at least somewhat good. Javascript should be replaced with something better, like Python.
How is this different than PhoneGap? If there is already a popular open source project that does this, why does Mozilla want to develop another?
This will fail over time but it will fail. We can only hope it fails sooner rather then later.
The idiocy of mixing a layout specification with code is going to open us up to more and more interesting types of viri and malware.
Remember CORBA? It has never seen the light of day in any serious way. It WAS a great idea.
Why have we not learned that a layout engine is most assuredly not the right tool for the job? The amount of hacks and just plain insanity you have to go through just to get thinks to work from one browser to another is starting to make lots and lots of people just go dust off their RAD tools, eg: Delphi, Power Builder, etc and just write the damn app and call it a day.
At some point the browser will have to be so huge to support the never ending flow of committee designed API's that they will make MS-Access look like a memory efficient application.
Applications are not documents and the browser needs to get back to doing document presentation and we need to build application processor that takes in application specifications and then runs them because trying to do both has been, is and will forever be a fucking mess.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
There is an 800 number on their site. I think we should all call and let them know how we feel about them spamming /.
... WebAPI will developed ...
Ha yes, the good old future past tense. I will liked it a lot!
When I read the comments, even if its unrelated to Firefox, all the top ones are only pure trolling again Mozilla.
Mozillhate is the new trend I guess. If you hate, you'll get karma and support!
You commenters all sound like writers for Apple. Your group think makes me smile.
And of course incompatible with the previous version
http://saveie6.com/
Even if only 10% of the zombie touchpads in the field continue to run webOS, the loyal user base will continue to develop for it. Perhaps they are wrong or misguided...but people still buy Morgan cars and build wooden sailboats. And I, wierdo that I am, Bluetooth tether a Pre to an Android tablet and can run the same HTML5 on both.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
No. There is a reason why Python is still a very minority language and Javascript (ECMAScript to be exact) is not. Javascript is good enough. For the great majority, Python is a PITA. Practicality trumps perfectionism, every single time.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
developing something that will be out of date before it's stable.
Wonderful.
What, the fuck, is a minuteness.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
The comments from the Mozilla haters seem pretty short-sighted and stupid.
Apple's first SDK for the iPhone was HTML/JavaScript based. It only failed because the renderer and JavaScript engine was pretty horrid and made it hard to produce good quality apps.
HTML5 is now pretty robust, and between PhoneGap and a UI toolkit (like Dojo Mobile) it is possible to produce good/great applications and be able to take a huge portion of code from iOS to Android to others.
In the end, the bias in software development should be to do as much code as you can in a cross-platform way, and then go native where it really suits the app's requirements. If you do anything else, you're wasting money.
It sounds like this is just a series of APIs to try and make the hardware of a mobile device available to an HTML 5 application? It would be nice for HTML 5 to have hardware acceleration, and for HTML 5 apps to be able to take advantage of GPS, accelerometer, etc data, but I don't think its the right approach. Personally, I like Adobe's approach to the problem of OS fragmentation with AIR better: create and maintain client-side run-time environments (VM's) that can execute pre-compiled code to facilitate OS agnosticism in applications. It worked pretty darn well for solving the problem of writing web application with OS/Browser agnosticism, I think it could do the same for the mobile platform.
Interesting that some of the fundamentals of this idea re built in to the DNA of the recently euthanized WebOS. I was always attracted to, conceptually, at least- using Javascript, HTMl and CSS frameworks for delivering Rich client GUIs, which is EXACTLY what WebOS was designed to do. As I understand, WebOS was a pleasure to dvelop for, too bad HP/Palm couldn't make a worthwhile go of it. Better luck Mozilla!