http://dev.opera.com/libraries/unite/
this is a stunningly cool idea, so much so i had to let people know about it and invite webkit developers (i'll ping the mozilla ones separately) to provide an implementation, too. the key bit is best hinted at from http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-unite-developer-primer/ - exerpt here: The request event listeners A Web server handles requests from clients and sends reponses back to them. The Opera Unite Web server is event-based and will raise a DOM event in the service every time a Web browser makes a connection to the server asking for files related to the Opera Unite Service. In order to respond to such events, we need to set up event listeners. This is done in window.onload: var webserver; var entries = []; window.onload = function () { webserver = opera.io.webserver if (webserver) { //Handle requests for various URLs webserver.addEventListener('_index', showEntryList, false); webserver.addEventListener('entry', showEntry, false); webserver.addEventListener('form', showForm, false); webserver.addEventListener('save', saveEntry, false); } } What is going on here? We are checking if the service is actually a Web service, by checking for the webserver object. If it is present, we add four event listeners _index, entry, form and save. The code for the _index request, the showEntryList function, is quite simple. When receiving a request, it writes back a HTML page with a list of the saved entries. function showEntryList(e) { var response = e.connection.response; response.write( '<!DOCTYPE html>' + '<html><head><title>Entries</title></head>' + '<body><ul>' ); for ( var i = 0, entry; entry = entries[i]; i++ ) { response.write('<li>'+entry.date+': <a href="entry?id='+i+'">'+entry.title+'</a></li>'); } response.write('</ul>' + '<p><a href="form">Add en entry</a>.</p>' + '</body></html>' ); response.close(); } in other words, this really is an actual implementation of a web server - in javascript - as part of the opera browser engine itself. implementation details of the proxy service, operaunite.com, are understandably sketchy. it provides firewall-busting technology which duh is kinda important to have, otherwise everyone running private web services in their browser are completely inaccessible. i can think of a ton of uses for this, well beyond just a few "web pages". if implementations are made truly peer-to-peer (and not dependent on operaunite.com) then ... dang. imagine for example the combination of xmpp, unite, and google wave services. l. _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
