Hi Doug,I'm not adamant that these requirements are met specifically just for Widgets, just that these are where the current use-cases come from. They certainly ought to be supported through more general technologies where possible.
There is also the issue of abstraction; should a widget author be looking at low-level APIs to deliver functionality, or call a common high-level API which is then implemented in a device/architecture- specific way? E.g. if a widget author script wants to get the list of current participants, should it need to be rewritten for every platform it might be deployed in (e.g. XHR in some, Web Sockets in another, native code another...) or can it call "widget.getParticipants()" and let the UA handle the implementation?
Just as, for example, the Widget Interface defines "preferences" using the Storage API: the actual choice of implementation of this (LocalStorage, SessionStorage, IndexedDB, WebDB, remote web service) is up to the UA.
So what I'm talking about here, just to be clear, are the high level API abstractions available to a running widget (and potentially other types of web application) and not any underlying protocols used to implement them.
The specific high-level APIs I'm interested in are:1. Participants [1]: getParticipants, getViewer, getOwner, setParticipantCallback 2. State [1]: getState, state.submitDelta, state.submitValue, setStateCallback
3. Friends/People [2]: getViewerFriends, getOwnerFriends(Note these are subsets of the functionality of the referenced specifications; other functionality they specify is already covered by other W3C work such as Widgets:TWI [3] and Widgets:VMMF[4])
In some cases these APIs could map onto DAP (e.g. getViewer would map to a call on the Contacts API) but in other cases would rely on other kinds of implementations (OpenSocial itself, XHR, Websockets, Widget Feature extensions etc). The principle interoperability being addressed would be a consistent runtime model for a widget author irrespective of deployment environment.
Widgets P&C already has a Feature extension mechanism for handling availability of additional APIs that would be well suited to negotiating availability of these types of APIs [5]. Apache Wookie already implements Widgets P&C with a subset of the Google Wave Gadget API in this fashion [6].
S [1] http://code.google.com/apis/wave/extensions/gadgets/reference.html [2] http://wiki.opensocial.org/index.php?title=OSAPI_Specification#osapi.people [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets-apis/ [4] http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-widgets-vmmf-20091006/ [5] http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/#the-feature-element [6] http://incubator.apache.org/wookie/ On 12 Feb 2010, at 23:50, Doug Schepers wrote:
Hi, Scott-I'm still confused as to what you're asking for as a chartered deliverable for Widgets.Like others, I am extremely reluctant to define any special functionality for Widgets, when it could be useful for Web applications at large. Let me try to break down some of what you are asking for in terms of specs we are already doing:* communication between different widgets on the same computer: Web Messaging [1] * communication between widgets on different computers: Web Sockets API [2], XHR [3] (through a gateway server)* access to contacts on a specific device: Contacts API (DAP WG) [4]* access to relationships between contacts, etc.: no current work, but possible as an online service (XHR), or locally through markup like RDFa or microdataI don't know what social APIs OpenSocial or Google Wave Gadget API expose, but anything above and beyond the deliverables listed above should probably be developed by another group (maybe in collaboration with the RDFa WG, since it probably has to do with ontologies?), and simply reused within Widgets or Web apps.But maybe I missed your point... can you give me a concise outline of what the specific use cases and requirements you have for this social API are?[1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/postmsg/ [2] http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/ [3] http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/XMLHttpRequest/ [4] http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/contacts/ Regards- -Doug Schepers W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs Scott Wilson wrote (on 2/12/10 5:39 PM):Specifically I'm thinking of access to friends/friends-of lists from author scripts in a Widget runtime. This is something of interest towidget developers, as it enables widgets to operate as social applications.OpenSocial is an obvious source of inspiration here - however the actual social APIs are only a small part of OpenSocial (which also covers all aspects of app packaging. processing. discovery and persistence) and arenot easily reused in other kinds of devices and architectures. The interop problem arises as currently authors of apps/widgets arebasically faced with two completely different "stacks" of specifications based on the presence or absence of a few very small features - and the"friends" API represents the main feature gap between the W3C widgets family of specifications and OpenSocial. Looking at recent developments, e.g. Vodafone's recent work onintegrating phone contacts and social network contacts, suggests that it will not only be web widgets that would be able to access this type ofAPI, but also mobile and desktop widgets. I would propose looking at this area with the W3C Social Web XG and identifying a set of spec requirements either for webapps or DAP (it could go either way - social APIs may fit better in DAP as they have analogues with the contacts API work there, however Widgets are the obvious vehicle for making use of such APIs. In any case some co-ordination would be useful).Currently in Apache Wookie we implement the Google Wave Gadget API as ameans of supporting inter-widget communication in collaborationscenarios (e.g. multi-user environments); however the fact that this API is completely different in almost every respect from the Google API toget at friends (as opposed to participants) indicates there is a significant interop gap where W3C could make a difference. (One way of looking at this is that requesta for "contacts","participants" and "friends" are just differently contextualized querieson a core "people API" and should behave consistently.)
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