Ideas on Brass monkey Opera Unite usage

[Chris Mills]

I also passed around some of your ideas about using Opera Unite
functionality in Brass Monkey, around Opera. One of our spec
developers, a guy called Rich Tibbett, has some really useful input
here, which is as follows:

"I think we have everything Brass Monkey would need in Unite today and
with a bit of cleverness, they should be able to hook up web pages to
their controllers via their own Unite-based UPnP API.

It is possible to actually hack up UPnP connectivity between a Unite
app and an extension. The following API is available within an
extension's background process (though we don't advertise this as a
feature yet):

http://dev.opera.com/libraries/servicediscovery/

If I'm not mistaken, Brass Monkey would be able to do the following:

1. Create a Brass Monkey Unite app that provides two UPnP HTTP
endpoints:
a. a Controller to Unite API.
b. a Unite to Extension API.

2. Create a Brass Monkey controller device (e.g. mobile) that
discovers and connects to any running Opera Unite API service (a) via
the UPnP/SSDP discovery protocol.

3. Create a Brass Monkey extension that discovers and connects to any
running Opera Unite API service (b) via the UPnP/SSDP discovery
protocol. The extension can then expose an API for ALL web pages to
plug-in to for creating their own Brass Monkey experiences (i.e. they
can inject a DOM API via the extension's injected script resource).

Voila, complete end to end gameplay for Brass Monkey users in Opera
Desktop.

It would be nice if users could install both the Unite and Extension
bits in one install process...but that's something we've also been
considering for some time but are yet to implement.

HTH and please feel free to share. If Brass Monkey need any other
pointers then let us know. If they come up with a list of outstanding
requirements beyond those listed above then that would be great for
our product planning going forward."

[Chris Mills]

Some further thoughts:

"As an alternative, you could also run it all through a web-based API
service, thereby not having to create and distribute an Opera Unite or
Opera Extension app.

Web developers could then just drop a Brass Monkey JS library in to
their pages that communicates back and forth with that centralized API
endpoint (which is possible because CORS is enabled on their server-
side).

It's probably a lot simpler but could suffer from latency issues
(though there are plenty of things they could do to minimize that e.g.
high-speed globally distributed CDNs to serve up such an API)."

[Chris Allen]

Interesting stuff Chris. We've all got our heads down just finishing up fixing bugs at the moment. But we will certainly look into this. We've already implemented much of what you describe here, and it works across multiple browsers, although not peer to peer. Things like discovery service for finding devices on a local network we already do for example. We also do have a server side implementation of Brass Monkey protocol that allows us to stream events across the Internet to other users.. With that said however, I need to look into this stuff in more detail to understand the differences, and to see what would be potentially useful to our product. My guess is that true peer to peer through the Opera browser will be useful feature though.

Thanks to you and your team for sharing this stuff!

-Chris

[Francois Laberge]

I looked into Unite a lot around January and my conclusion was that the strength of Unite was in multimedia(watching/listening to your local media files. Photos too!) and and as a game server for LAN play. This because like Chris said(and you realized in your second email) we don't necessarily need Unites protocols. There may be cases where it is more efficient, but simplicity rules the day right now.

Ps. These platform and future plan conversations would preferably go directly to Chris and I as this mailing list is shared with third-parties and will likely be public when we open up our beta and archived/searchable. We'd rather have our musings of Company plans less publicly documented.

Francois

Sent from my iPhone

> Chris Allen
> President and CTO
> ch...@brassmonkeysdk.com
> 617.429.3235

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