BONDI History
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About this wiki page
This wiki page is one of several wiki pages that OpenAjax Alliance will use to collect feedback from its members via its wiki about the BONDI 1.0 Release Candidate specifications. The key review period goes from 'Feb. 12-25, 2009. See BONDI for more information about this BONDI review and feedback initiative. The full set of wiki pages is as follows:
- BONDI - Main wiki page
- BONDI Feedback APIs - Feedback page relative to the general approaches that OMTP is using for its APIs. Are the APIs understandable, familiar in approach, and convenient to JavaScript developers?
- BONDI Feedback Security - Feedback page relative to the security features in BONDI. Is the design robust? Are there any security holes? Are the security features easy enough to use?
- BONDI Feedback Enterprise - Enter any detailed spec errors on this wiki
- BONDI Evangelism - Possible ways that OpenAjax Alliance might be able to help evangelize BONDI
- BONDI V2 Wishlist - OMTP will start discussion about future versions of BONDI in March 2009. This wiki page collects any feature requests from OpenAjax members.
- BONDI History - Quick introduction of historical activities leading up to BONDI initiative
History and background
OpenAjax Alliance has been working in partnership with the W3C and OMTP since 2007 towards advancing the Mobile Ajax ecosystem. One focus area for the three organizations has been around "Mobile Device APIs" for JavaScript that would be added to the "Web Runtime" (i.e., an Ajax-capable browser engine) on mobile devices. These JavaScript API extensions would allow HTML+JavaScript (i.e., Ajax) to access mobile device capabilities such as the phone dialer, current location, SMS engine, MMS engine, local email, address book, network connection status, and several other things, thereby allowing industry standard Open Web technologies to be used for advanced mobile applications instead of proprietary, phone-specific development environments.
An early, informal coordination meetings on the subject happened at 3GSM (now known as Mobile Web Congress: MWC) in February 2007, hosted by Vodafone. This meeting led to the following event:
One of the conclusions from the workshop was that the industry needed standards for APIs that would allow JavaScript access to device services. In response to that, OpenAjax Alliance brought together several companies to collaborate on due diligence, use cases, requirements and security considerations. After another industry meeting at MWC in February 2008, OpenAjax Alliance accelerated its efforts, and completed a fast-track exploratory initiative by early June 2008. These early efforts produced the following wiki pages:
In parallel with the above OpenAjax Alliance activities, the OMTP worked towards setting up formal activities around their BONDI initiative, which launched in late spring of 2009. In June/July 2009, OpenAjax Alliance and OMTP concluded jointly that OMTP would drive the initiative going forward, with OpenAjax acting as a partner. (Note that there has been considerable overlap between participants in the OpenAjax Mobile Device API work and BONDI.)
In the summer of 2008, OMTP requested that OpenAjax Alliance consult its Ajax experts and produce a "style guide" for designing JavaScript APIs. The objective with the style guide was to inform OMTP about best practices so that the BONDI APIs would be familiar, easy-to-learn, and easy-to-use for Ajax developers.
From late spring 2008 until now, OMTP has been pushing aggressively towards rapid completion of the version 1.0 BONDI specifications, completion of an open source reference implementation, and a test suite. As of Feb. 9, 2009, the specifications are largely complete and are in a final review period. Open source implementations are far along. Test suite work is more towards the beginning. OTMP continues to push for rapid finalization and hopes to complete version 1.0 in the first months of 2009.
