webinos

The FOKUS Competence Center Future Applications and Media is proud to be the project leader of the large-scale EU funded webinos project. 

Applications dominate today’s smartphone market. In the future, internet-capable TVs, tablet and desktop devices, as well as cars will all run apps, which can, for example, help plan and book your next vacation.

With the mobile Internet growing steadily, the call to develop a single universal platform and environment for the development of mobile internet applications is becoming stronger than ever. That is why more than twenty partners from research and industry, representing the global mobile web, consumer electronics and the automotive industry elite, teamed-up to work on the Secure Web Operating System Application Delivery System - called webinos project. Led by the Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS, a consortium of major, international companies develops an open source platform and software components that will allow cross-platform use of services and technologies that can be operated on multiple screens. Most recently, the consortium publishes its research results at www.webinos.org

FAME in webinos

Our engagement in webinos is as manifold and complex as the EU funded project itself. FAME lead Dr. Stephan Steglich is project leader. FAME senior computer researcher, Christian Fuhrhop is leader of the “webinos Architecture” work package.

A number of technologies and components developed by FAME will be contributed and continued within webinos project:

Media Web Runtime 2012

The FOKUS Media Web Runtime 2012 (MWR2012) supports software developers in realizing cross platform Rich Internet Applications targeting the mobile, consumer electronics, and desktop domains by extending the functional range of traditional Web browsers. Within webinos we will focus our work on following components:

• widget handling
• geo-location
• camera usage
• NFC usage

Open IPTV technologies

The Fraunhofer FOKUS Open IPTV compliant Ecosystem provides solutions for open standard and end-to-end IPTV for managed and unmanaged networks. This includes specifications from Open IPTV Forum (OIPF), ETSI TISPAN, HbbTV and OMTP. Developed in-line and somewhat ahead of standardizations, the Fraunhofer FOKUS Open IPTV Ecosystem is the first solution available to offer practical end-to-end implementations. We adapted some crucial components to webinos’ needs:

• channel switch
• HTML5 video object integration
• video object information providing
• parental rating for better audience ad targeting, commercial distribution
• yet no classical broadcast information distribution - hence, IPTV

MashWeb 2

FOKUS Mashups 2.0 combine the easy creation, rich presentation, and intensive user-interaction of Mashups with cross-platform web applications technologies paving the way towards a novel generation of highly dynamic and distributable Web applications. FOKUS MashWeb is a software suite that enables software developers to bind 3rd party services dynamically to their applications during runtime and to distribute their Mashup applications between the client and server side. Within webinos, we will focus on integaration of powerful secure javascripting – known from MashWeb 2.0 – into webinos. With the continuous flow of JavaScripts it is almost impossible to control which scripts have access to devices and what access exactly they get. Once developers send their apps to the stores they practically lose control over the script flow. Secure javascripting offers security breach prevention with the help of fine-grained policies which use a set of rules and requirements and not just the host name, portal and protocol for identification which was the standard till now.

Web-app distribution

Fraunhofer FOKUS MEGASTORE enables application deployment across devices and platforms. Developers can provide their applications for a broad range of terminals including mobile phones, set-top boxes and TV sets, mobile and desktop computers. Beside cross-platform support, MEGASTORE implements a variety of innovative app deployment features. Some of them we would add to webinos for better functionality and performance of connected stores:

• widget sales
• widget parsing
• event handling
• web app handling

Let’s cooperate!

If you are interested in bringing in your expertise in form of use-cases and requirements or to participate in the specification process and open source development, join the webinos consortium.

Get in touch with us.

Join the conversation on Twitter: @fraunhoferfokus

Do you like webinos?  facebook.com/webinosproject

Download the webinos flyer: