Intent to Experiment: Web Bluetooth API

[Anirudh Mohan]

(bcc experimen...@chromium.org)

Summary

The Web Bluetooth API allows web pages to communicate to a wide variety of devices over Bluetooth.

Contact email

web-bl...@chromium.org

Spec

Link to spec

Motivation

As connectable devices proliferate, users will need a frictionless way of interacting with them. For public devices in particular, users will tend to interact with them in quick, ephemeral ways. The web and the Web Bluetooth API provides a model to facilitate these frictionless interactions.

Goals for experimentation

• Have we selected a useful subset of Bluetooth functionality?

• Is the API surface convenient for developers?

• What wrappers do people build to improve the API? Can we provide that interface directly?

• Do we need to implement the whole spec to ship, or can we usefully omit things like getDescriptor?

• What types of websites / device manufacturers are interested in the API?

Experimental timeline

Enabled:

• February 26th, 2016: Chrome 50 Branch to Dev.

• April 19th: Chrome 50 Stable*.

• May 20th: Chrome 52 Branch to Dev.

• 4 weeks of 50 stable channel feedback.

• May 31st: Chrome 51 Stable*.

• July 1st: Chrome 53 Branch to Dev.

• 10 weeks of 50 stable channel feedback.

• 4 weeks of 51 stable channel feedback.

• July 26th: Chrome 52 Stable*.

Disabled:

• September 6th, 2016: Chrome 53 Stable*. Initial experiment terminates.

* Stable dates are estimates: https://www.chromium.org/developers/calendar.

Any risks when the experiment finishes?

Sites may be built to work with Web Bluetooth, and these will stop working when it's removed.

Ongoing technical constraints

To ship, we need tests that use real Bluetooth radio communication, which will add requirements to the physical setup of our testing infrastructure. We're not adding those tests for the experiment.

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView)?

For the experimental framework launch, only Chrome OS and Android.

Eventually, the API will be supported on Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, and Android.

OWP launch tracking bug

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=581740

Link to entry on the feature dashboard

https://www.chromestatus.com/features/5264933985976320

--

Ani Mohan | Chrome

[PhistucK]

How are you going to get answers to those questions? Will participating website authors be required to provide feedback (or at least join a certain mailing list)?

Is the status at https://github.com/WebBluetoothCG/web-bluetooth/blob/gh-pages/implementation-status.md up to date? It looks like many Chromebooks are not supported...

☆PhistucK

--

Ani Mohan | Chrome

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "experimentation-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to experimentation...@chromium.org.
To post to this group, send email to experimen...@chromium.org.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/experimentation-dev/CA%2BYF5hHOuF83A%2BDdzaj%3DLqN%3DGqYf_niEK0VqV2nwO9Y2dygYow%40mail.gmail.com.

[Torne (Richard Coles)]

Will this add a new permission? Are we going to need new Android WebView APIs to deal with this (e.g. to allow the embedding app to decide whether the origin should be granted permission to use bluetooth devices, or to control the selection of devices)? Will the experimental version be specifically disabled for WebView?

[Jeffrey Yasskin]

Yes, we'll need a new Android WebView API to let the embedder control
the bluetooth chooser, and until that's designed/available, we intend
to disable the API in WebView.

Jeffrey

[Dimitri Glazkov]

Just a quick note: the "intent to experiment" does not seem to be part of the process, so I am not really sure how we Blink API owners should be approaching this.

:DG<

[Anirudh Mohan]

+Owen Campbell-Moore +Dru Knox -- do you have guidance here? We're following instructions in this doc (according to which no LGTMs are required).

--

Ani Mohan | Chrome

[Jeffrey Yasskin]

Owen put together a process for use of the experimental framework;
sorry for not including a link to it in this first Intent using it:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oMwlGNipMg73tb4yqZC2D95XFCU5h_zV7ht76YmULPo/edit

We should get that into the Blink process page once folks are
basically happy with it.

[Jeffrey Yasskin]

On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 2:30 PM, PhistucK <phis...@gmail.com> wrote:
> How are you going to get answers to those questions? Will participating
> website authors be required to provide feedback (or at least join a certain
> mailing list)?

Yes. We don't have the formal process set up yet, but when developers
sign up for an experiment, we'll exchange enough contact information
to get feedback, and they'll be required to provide feedback in order
to renew their token.

That raises the question of how long we want the tokens to be valid.
We plan the experiment to continue for 3 Chrome releases but we could
insist that developers renew their tokens every release. I'm bcc'ing
experimentation-dev so anyone there can chime in on this question if
they have ideas or a ready-made answer.

> Is the status at
> https://github.com/WebBluetoothCG/web-bluetooth/blob/gh-pages/implementation-status.md
> up to date? It looks like many Chromebooks are not supported...

We haven't managed to test most Chromebooks, and that list only
includes ones we know are working. The rest probably work, and the
ChromeOS team has been fairly responsive at fixing bugs we report.

Jeffrey

[abhi.ka...@gmail.com]

Hello

I am a developer from India who keeps a great interest in web bluetooth API.

I want to experiment it with beacons for my website.

How can I enter?

Thank You

[owe...@google.com]

Ani - there was a discussion about this intent, and the overall process of intents to experiment, at the Blink API owners meeting - they were happy with the general approach and not requiring LGTMs for intents to experiment so from that perspective everything looks good.

I'll leave the Web Bluetooth team to chime in on Abhi's question about he can get an API key for his site.

Thanks

[Jeffrey Yasskin]

Thanks for the interest!

For Chrome 50, we're keeping fairly tight control over which sites can participate in the public experiment, but you can experiment on your own machines by turning on the chrome://flags/#enable-web-bluetooth flag. When you have a demo you can show us, mail web-bl...@chromium.org, and we'll see if we can whitelist you. Check out https://plus.google.com/communities/108953318610326025178 for the other demos people are building.

We expect to open up signups much more in Chrome 51, so even if we can't give you access to Chrome 50 users, you should be able to run a public experiment 6 weeks later.

Jeffrey

[abhishek Kanodia]

Is there any specific deadline to submit the demo websites. Because we are building our demo website and it may take us 30 days to come up with a demo

Abhishek Kanodia

Under Graduate Student

BITS Pilani

[Jeffrey Yasskin]

There's no deadline. We can generate experimental framework keys at any time.

[abhishek Kanodia]

Thank You so much.

Abhishek Kanodia

Under Graduate Student

BITS Pilani

[Anirudh Mohan]

Hi all,

As an update to this, we've decided to start the experiment one release later in M51. Below is the updated timeline:

Experimental timeline

Enabled:

• April 8, 2016: Chrome 51 Branch to Dev.

• May 31st: Chrome 51 Stable*.

• Jul 1: Chrome 53 Branch to Dev.

• 4 weeks of 51 stable channel feedback.

• Jul 26: Chrome 52 Stable*.
• Aug 26: Chrome 54 Branch to Dev.
• 13 weeks of 51 stable channel feedback.
• 5 weeks of 52 stable channel feedback.
• Sep 6: Chrome 53 Stable*.

Disabled:

• Oct 18, 2016: Chrome 54 Stable*. Initial experiment terminates.

*Stable dates are estimates: https://www.chromium.org/developers/calendar.

September 6th, 2016: Chrome 53 Stable*. Initial experiment terminates.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "blink-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org.

--

Ani Mohan | Chrome

[Anirudh Mohan]

As an update, we've again decided to change the schedule for the experiment. We plan to start the origin trial in M53 -- I'll share more details on a timeline as we approach the date.

Thanks,

Ani

--

Ani Mohan | Chrome

[Anirudh Mohan]

(bcc experimen...@chromium.org)

Hi all,

I wanted to follow up with the more detailed timeline for the origin trial for M53:

Experimental timeline

Enabled:

• Sept 6, 2016: Chrome 53 Stable*.
• Oct 6: Chrome 55 Branch to Dev.
• 4 weeks of 53 stable channel feedback.
Oct 18: Chrome 54 Stable*.
Nov 17: Chrome 56 Branch to Dev.

• 10 weeks of 53 stable channel feedback.
• 4 weeks of 54 stable channel feedback.
• Dec 6: Chrome 55 Stable*.

Disabled:

• Jan 31, 2017: Chrome 56 Stable*. Initial experiment terminates.
  

*Stable dates are estimates: https://www.chromium.org/developers/calendar.

--

Ani Mohan | Chrome