A Design and Implementation of Web Intent Agent on Android

by Cheng Zheng for OpenIntents

Web Intents is an upcoming framework for web-based inter-application communication and service discovery. This project explores possible ways of integrating Web Intents with Android intent system. To my knowledge, there are only two ways of using Web Intents: 1. Some versions of Google Chrome and Chromium 18 have native support to Web Intents. 2. By using the JavaScript shim provided by http://webintents.org/ Firefox also has some experimental experiences in this field as described in web-activities-app-discovery. But I found that it seems very difficult to work on these in Andriod by myself. The reasons are: a. currently only ICS i.e. Android 4.x has brought in support to Chrome while all other versions seems not working if I continue my work on Chrome; b. Chrome extension for Web Intents is developed in C which is out of my reach. So after some considerations I decided to develop a new Android app named WIAgent which is a very simple browser now designed specific to Web Intents. Thus I can do my exploratory work on this app and have more control over it. In addition, this app is not restricted by ICS.