Opera Scope protocol specification has just been released

[David Storey]

Hi,

I’m the Product Manager of Opera Dragonfly – Opera’s developer tools.
When we set about the task of building debugging tools for Opera, we
needed a protocol to be able to communicate between the developer
tools and the underlying rendering engine. As Opera is available for
many platforms we needed to make sure that this protocol could
communicate with remote devices, such as a mobile phone, or a TV,
etc.

For this we produced the Scope protocol. The current version is use
today is called STP/0, but as we used it in Opera Dragonfly and our
other tools that use Scope, we discovered there were cases where
things could be optimised for better performance and scalability. Thus
we are working on STP/1 which is an improvement in a number of areas.
This should be ready by Presto 2.4. One key change is being able to
use Google Protocol buffers or JSON instead of just XML. Opera
Dragonfly has to support both protocol versions as backwards
compatibility is important, but for new products that support Scope
only Scope STP/1 needs to be supported.

We were planning to publish the Scope protocol in the near future, but
as we were pointed in the direction of this group, we decided it would
be good to get the documentation out now. A more in depth post can be
found on the Opera Dragonfly blog at http://my.opera.com/dragonfly/blog/scope-protocol-specification,
and the documentation can be found at http://dragonfly.opera.com/app/scope-interface/

We’d love it if this group can have a look over the specification and
give us any comments or questions. If another browser or user agent
wishes to implement Scope, we are willing to put it through the
standardisation process at the most relevant venue. We hope it will
meet your needs as well as it meets ours.