Re: Intent to Implement: Web Activities for Android
On 04/15/2014 11:08 PM, Joshua Dover wrote: as this current specification is not on a standards track (and will probably not be compatible with what we have now). That sounds like a clear "no" to me. HTH Ms2ger ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Intent to Implement: Web Activities for Android
On 4/15/2014 5:08 PM, Joshua Dover wrote: Summary: Allow webpages, web apps, and addons to interact with native Android apps via MozActivity Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=970707 Link to standard: current MozActivity not on standards track: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MozActivity Platform coverage: Android Estimated or target release: in which version do you want to/plan to release this? Preference behind which this will be implemented: dom.activities.enabled This will retain the ‘Moz’ prefix in order to maintain compatibility with B2G as this current specification is not on a standards track (and will probably not be compatible with what we have now). - Notes from the Extensible Web Summit this month (http://oksoclap.com/p/8pYs44D5CQ) :sicking should be able to provide more info on standardization progress. I am concerned about this. It doesn't look like there is a plan for standardizing this, and at first glance it seems that we wouldn't even consider shipping this on Android or desktop without a reasonably solid specification. Is the point of implementing this now to determine whether the existing web activities "spec" can interoperate with native Android intents? Or what is the end-goal of implementing this? --BDS ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Intent to Implement: Web Activities for Android
Something like this is needed for integration of B2G WebApps on Android. Without it, they have no way of talking to one another, let alone any way of talking to Native Apps. The best they can provide is launching a uri with a specific scheme and to hope something on the other end is able to pick it up. There's also no way to get a return value from that app. I don't think we can provide a compelling experience there without providing something like this. We're planning to hold this to non-release builds for now though. - Wes On 04/16/2014 05:45 AM, Benjamin Smedberg wrote: On 4/15/2014 5:08 PM, Joshua Dover wrote: Summary: Allow webpages, web apps, and addons to interact with native Android apps via MozActivity Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=970707 Link to standard: current MozActivity not on standards track: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MozActivity Platform coverage: Android Estimated or target release: in which version do you want to/plan to release this? Preference behind which this will be implemented: dom.activities.enabled This will retain the ‘Moz’ prefix in order to maintain compatibility with B2G as this current specification is not on a standards track (and will probably not be compatible with what we have now). - Notes from the Extensible Web Summit this month (http://oksoclap.com/p/8pYs44D5CQ) :sicking should be able to provide more info on standardization progress. I am concerned about this. It doesn't look like there is a plan for standardizing this, and at first glance it seems that we wouldn't even consider shipping this on Android or desktop without a reasonably solid specification. Is the point of implementing this now to determine whether the existing web activities "spec" can interoperate with native Android intents? Or what is the end-goal of implementing this? --BDS ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Intent to Implement: Web Activities for Android
On 4/16/2014 12:37 PM, Wes Johnston wrote: Something like this is needed for integration of B2G WebApps on Android. Without it, they have no way of talking to one another, let alone any way of talking to Native Apps. The best they can provide is launching a uri with a specific scheme and to hope something on the other end is able to pick it up. There's also no way to get a return value from that app. I don't think we can provide a compelling experience there without providing something like this. We're planning to hold this to non-release builds for now though. When you say "intent to implement" what is it you're planning on implementing? * web activities between b2g-style webapps on Android * web activities called by sites loaded in the Firefox for Android browser? * web activities provided by sites loaded in the Firefox for Android browser? * webapps can call into native apps via web activities APIs (e.g. sharing->native twitter)? * webapps exposing intents to native Android apps via activities? Intents do seem like a pretty fundamental part of an app ecosystem, but there seems to be a big disconnect between the stated intent to implementing them for Android and yet having no clear plan to standardize them. I strongly feel we shouldn't ship this (to release users on Android/desktop) until we have a stable spec. What's the point of implementing this if we don't also have plans to standardize and ship it? --BDS ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Intent to Implement: Web Activities for Android
> When you say "intent to implement" what is it you're planning on > implementing? For the initial drop here, we've implemented a way for web apps (or sites if we decide to enable this for them, but after talking here and with the team, I think restricting this to WebApps is a good idea), to fire WebIntents that will be converted to Android Intents. Those intents are fired out to any apps on the phone that want them, and the return data from those (if there is any) is passed back to the app. Part 2 of this will be updating the synthetic APK's to act as receivers for Android intents so that they'll be able to also receive intents from the system (whether those intents come from other WebApps or Native Apps, there is no difference between WebApps and NativeApps from our perspective). We're holding this to non-release builds for now while just to gain some comfort with it, but the intent is to ship it to release builds eventually. After talking with finkle a bit, I think our intent will be to ship it enabled for WebApps on Android only initially. While the web at large probably needs things like this, as you've mentioned this isn't on a standards track yet. There are a lot more questions to answer before we enable it there. - Wes ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Intent to Implement: Web Activities for Android
On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 10:08 PM, Joshua Dover wrote: > - Notes from the Extensible Web Summit this month > (http://oksoclap.com/p/8pYs44D5CQ) :sicking should be able to provide more > info on standardization progress. I'm not sicking, but there was some interest there from Google and we definitely need something like this if we want decentralized coordination among web applications to be possible. And to get there we definitely need to get implementation experience. As long as we are not shipping in stable I don't see any harm in getting this out there and figuring out UI, which is by far the biggest problem. -- http://annevankesteren.nl/ ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Intent to Implement: Web Activities for Android
- Original Message - > When you say "intent to implement" what is it you're planning on > implementing? > * web activities between b2g-style webapps on Android Yes > * web activities called by sites loaded in the Firefox for Android browser? > * web activities provided by sites loaded in the Firefox for Android > browser? No. Not until some momentum on a spec is happening. > * webapps can call into native apps via web activities APIs (e.g. > sharing->native twitter)? Yes > * webapps exposing intents to native Android apps via activities? Ideally, yes > Intents do seem like a pretty fundamental part of an app ecosystem, but > there seems to be a big disconnect between the stated intent to > implementing them for Android and yet having no clear plan to > standardize them. I strongly feel we shouldn't ship this (to release > users on Android/desktop) until we have a stable spec. What's the point > of implementing this if we don't also have plans to standardize and ship it? Even though we only intend to implement activities/intents for webapps, we still plan to keep them off of Release (Beta and GA) until we feel the experience is working well enough. We don't have plans to implement activities/intents for general browser-based web sites. As you point out, we need some standardization first. ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
Re: Intent to Implement: Web Activities for Android
In FirefoxOS we already limit the ability to *handle* an activity to webapps, however we do allow websites to initiate an activity. I think it would make sense to only allow webapps to both handle and initiate activities on android. This way we can limit exposure until we have a solution that is more hammered out. Note that WebActivities have worked pretty well for us in FirefoxOS so far. However we know that there are several issues with it, especially around activities that return a value. These issues are bad enough that Google backed out their entire WebIntents implementation from Chrome. I.e. the way that the API is currently designed, it will not work on desktop. Fixing these issues will require making incompatible changes to the API. It would be super awesome if someone wanted to spend time on fixing these issues. It shouldn't be terribly hard, but it will require doing UX experiments on both mobile and desktop. So far we've been unable to rally people to do that. But until we've fixed those issues I think it's safer to limit exposure of this API. But exposing it only in installed apps should limit things enough I'd think. Another thing that we should watch out for when implementing on Android is that I think the security model for Android Intents is different from WebActivities. I would not think it's safe to allow an random webpage or even installed webapp to launch arbitrary Android Intents with arbitrary data. A safer implementation strategy is to only forward known activities to Android Intents. I.e. only forwarding things like "pick" and "share". Another thing to keep in mind is that we in FirefoxOS currently have failed at keeping our activity names and parameters at all consistent. Various efforts to clean this up has been attempted, but so far nothing has been implemented. Activity names and parameters are essentially public APIs towards webpages and should be treated as such. / Jonas On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 2:08 PM, Joshua Dover wrote: > Summary: Allow webpages, web apps, and addons to interact with native Android > apps via MozActivity > Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=970707 > Link to standard: current MozActivity not on standards track: > https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MozActivity > Platform coverage: Android > Estimated or target release: in which version do you want to/plan to release > this? > Preference behind which this will be implemented: dom.activities.enabled > > This will retain the 'Moz' prefix in order to maintain compatibility with B2G > as this current specification is not on a standards track (and will probably > not be compatible with what we have now). > > - Notes from the Extensible Web Summit this month > (http://oksoclap.com/p/8pYs44D5CQ) :sicking should be able to provide more > info on standardization progress. > ___ > dev-platform mailing list > dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform ___ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
