ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Jamie Strandboge <jamie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 07/18/2013 04:18 PM, Jamie Strandboge wrote:
> On 07/18/2013 01:20 PM, Thomas Voß wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 7:06 PM, Marc Deslauriers
>> <marc.deslauriers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> On 13-07-18 01:00 PM, Jamie Strandboge wrote:
>>>> On 07/18/2013 11:14 AM, Michał Sawicz wrote:
>>>>> W dniu 18.07.2013 17:38, Marc Deslauriers pisze:
>>>>>> For the browser, I imagine a URL handler will take care of it, but what about
>>>>>> spawning a different application that doesn't necessarily handle URLs or MIME types?
>>>>>
>>>>> And for network access I expect some platform API instead.
>>>>>
>>>>> I feel like the only instance where we would indeed allow spawning other
>>>>> apps directly would be if it's bundled in the same package - and handled
>>>>> through upstart as usual, I'd say.
>>>>
>>>> Well, an app may want to spawn a browser rather than implementing a webview
>>>> itself. Marc mentioned the URL handler, but I don't know how this would work.
>>>> Marc, can you elaborate?
>>>
>>> Not really. I remember there was discussion around an API to allow apps to open
>>> stuff using a URL, such as http://www.ubuntu.com, or unity://wireless-settings
>>> or something similar. Was there going to be a dbus API for this?
>>>
>>
>> My last status on this is that we are going to have a URL handler
>> binary that apps can register with, much like for example on iOS. With
>> that, Jamie's web-browser example is easily solvable, and so are more
>> sophisticated use-cases like gallery://albums/birthday/cake.png. Not
>> sure if it's DBus or not, but I'm very much in favor of doing URL
>> handling as opposed to mime-type handling.
> 
> Cool, I'm glad others have thought about it. This feels like another good place
> for the trusted helper approach (which suggests DBus, but it doesn't strictly
> have to be). If the process doing the launching is out of process from the app,
> it handles different avenues attack (eg, manipulating the environment, not being
> able to ptrace the other app). Though in thinking about it, we should get all
> this simply having upstart in the mix.
> 
Another thought that I meant to mention before: this clearly works really well
for the click package/Ubuntu SDK model, where everything is designed to work
with this and all applications are confined, but what about the converged device
with a non-Ubuntu-designed but otherwise perfectly useful application? Would it
use standard desktop mimetypes? What about Ubuntu derivatives that may not share
our application lifecycle, will click packages not work as well there?

-- 
Jamie Strandboge                 http://www.ubuntu.com/

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