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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.
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?
How else would you recommend working around the $300 per year* overhead cost of developing native iOS applications and the iOS application approval process? If phone makers want to diminish their products' battery life by promoting battery-inefficient application platforms, let 'em.
* Breaks down as follows: $100 per year for the cert, $500 every 5 years for buying a MacBook Air and a copy of Windows to run in VirtualBox instead of a Windows laptop, and $250 every 2.5 years for an iPod touch on which to test iOS applications.
If you can't afford $300 a year then you probably should choose a different job than a professional programmer. $300 is less than a days pay for any professional programmer.
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
Totally. We are still fighting Apple to support things like HTML5. Oh wait...
I know professional programmers working for less than $80k. Protip: Not all of the worlds programmers live in the first world.
I don't know about Apple since they are more or less part of a duopoly, but Microsoft will only stand to gain from this. A common API means easier to port functionality between platforms, right?
Yeah, some of them live in America.
Yes, but even those programmers in the second and third world are more than capable of paying $300 a year (which is mostly inflated since you add a bunch of artificial costs that are not absolutely necessity for iOS development) for the development tools. Hell you'll pay more than for Android development since you'll be forced to buy way more than just a single device to check compatibility of your apps.
Yes.
They already have one - HTML5 apps are already a feature of iOS. They predate the App Store, even.
$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 don't agree.
Do you think HTML5 would have existed without Mozilla.
It was Mozilla and Opera that started the WHATWG which started the work on HTML5.
Now all major browsers (IE9, Opera, Firefox, Chromium/Chrome, Safari) support large parts of the HTML5 and related specifications and are working on adding more support each release they do.
New things are always on the horizon
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!
... 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!
And of course incompatible with the previous version
http://saveie6.com/
$300 is less than a days pay for any professional programmer.
I'm living in the wrong country.
Well like the Swedish company called Ericsson who has been working on technology like this for about or over a year. See Ericsson Labs and https://labs.ericsson.com/developer-community/blog/omg-camera-still for mor information on this.
For those that do not know of Ericsson, they are very large within telecom infrastructure, and if they still do, also owns the Ericsson part in phone manufacturer Sony Ericsson.)
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."
Well, I live in a major metropolitan area. My day rate is $500 USD.
But I don't work every day.... so yeah, dropping 400 bucks randomly on some iDevice is something I think twice about.
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.
Um, let's see...You're talking about the company that:
1. Refused to adopt POSIX standards.
2. Has its own calling conventions for C/C++ incompatible with the GNU ones.
3. Released Direct3D to try and kill OpenGL.
4. Actually had people on the OpenGL board trying to actively stall its development.
5. Tried to release J++ to compete with Java.
6. Maintained its own Java VM for years, slightly incompatible with Sun's.
7. Released C#, to compete with Java.
8. Opposed open document formats.
9. Released it's own API to compete with both CUDA and OpenCL.
10. Has had the least standard compliant web browser for years.
Those are only the cases I know about, but yeah... Sure... Judging from their track record, they'll adopt these web APIs right away... Microsoft loves interoperability...
HTML 5 apps can be first-class apps on the phone with icons and everything, and don't require bundling and placing in the app store, eh?
No, didn't think so.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Yes, Apple's excellent HTML 5 support enables web apps to simply install an icon on the iPhone home screen and behave like real apps.
Oh, wait...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
They can have icons and everything, and can be launched right from your home screen.
There's currently a speed discrepancy between apps launched this way and the exact same app navigated to from within Safari due to an older version of Webkit being used from the home-screen-launched version, due to security and sandboxing complexity (the new version is faster, but would create a security problem without a proper sandbox), but this is being fixed in iOS5.
And no, you don't have to have them bundled with the phone, or get them through the App Store.
So you "didn't thin so" because you didn;t actually do any research on the topic. Classic slashdot.