acmeattic-devel team mailing list archive

[Aditya Manthramurthy <aditya.mmy@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 14 July 2010 12:15 AM, krishnan parthasarathi wrote:
> The browser based client is being described as a firefox addon in the 
> blueprint. The browser based client needs to be able to 
> decrypt/encrypt data given the key from the client local filesystem 
> and transmit messages to server using the message protocol we design. 
> I think this can be done using Java Script. OTOH, a firefox addon is 
> written only if you want to extend the functionality of the browser to 
> perform extra functions. for eg, playing mp3, displaying pdf files, 
> etc. Do we want to abstract our browser based client app as an 
> extension of firefox's functionality?

No, we do not need to abstract it as a browser extension. If we use 
Javascript, it will have to be served by a webserver - there is the 
issue of trusting this code. The difference with using a browser 
extension is that all the source code is available to the user, and so 
can be trusted. We can have clients implemented in JS, as a separate 
server application perhaps even running on a different server machine, 
etc, and other people can implement them too - exposing a server API 
just illustrates that all this is possible. I would however suggest that 
if we write a browser based client, it should be an extension, so that a 
user can trust it.

--
Aditya.