thecodersbreakfast.net VS.

smartjava.org

If you’ve read any of my other articles you’re probably aware that I really like this whole “browser as the platform” concept. We can easily communicate with backend services using web sockets, parallelize javascript with web workers and access a lot of device capabilities such as web camera, battery and most of the acceleration and location sensors. One of the things, though, that was missing, was a way to easily share information between web apps.Most web applications such as twitter, dropbox, facebook, google+ have their own custom APIs, and if you want to share information with these web applications, or make use of the services they provide (e.g. store a document in dropbox) you have to use those APIs. The share button used on this site for instance makes use of all the services specific APIs to share information. If one of the interfaces should change, a new version must be created. On android there is something called intents, which is a standard way of apps to share information that avoids all these problems.Instead of requiring tight integration the application that wants to share something just asks the system which apps can fulfill the request. The system returns with a list of apps the user can select and that’s it. The data is sent exchanged between the apps, without requiring custom integration.Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have something like that for web apps? No more need to support 30+ different bookmarking sites, 20+ social networks and 15+ picture websites. Just one simple way to exchange information in a standard manner. Well, we can. Or better said, we’ll be able to do this soon across browsers. Web intents is a new W3C specification proposed by google, to bring the goodness of Android intents to web applications.In this tutorial I’ll show you an example how to do this. I’ve also put the demo online here if you want to test for yourself. Before this will work however, you need to add a chrome extension that registers for this intent (more inf