FDC3 for Web Browsers Discussion group 20th June 2024

[kriswest]

Group overview

Group convened to discuss how to enable FDC3 use in a web browser, without the use of a browser extension (such as fdc3-desktop-agent or a container).

Issue: #896
Mailing list discussion: https://groups.google.com/a/finos.org/g/fdc3/c/jCvlLjokBLs

In a recent email on the FDC3 mailing list, @kriswest wrote:

... I also want to add that there is clearly significant interest in the community in enabling FDC3 use on the web. There is a strong use case in that it would enable better onboarding journeys with less drop-off (where you use an app on the web with others before adopting a desktop container or similar).

and:

But there are also additional challenges such as how to make the API available reliably without importing a proprietary module from a particular vendor into every app, how to deal with more than one implementation of API/Desktop Agent in the browser at once, how to do this reliably and securely within the browser sandbox etc.. Work needs to be done in the Standard to solve these issues and to make web browser use possible in a future FDC3 Standard version - which I believe is possible (and likely to involve using a vendor-agnostic FDC3 NPM module to detect and connect to API implementation(s)). However, we're going to need to do that work to enable the aforementioned API implementations to be compliant and if we fail to hold the line now on compliance with the current version of the FDC3 Standard, that may never happen.

Shared doc with current draft: https://tick42-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/finsemble_datastore_interop_io/EZ0dfTCdRlJCnIF3C_1Oit0BF3fsXyvlMbisXp722DC9Kg?e=H2y7fn

Relevant issue tags

Current open issues that relate to the above concepts with the label:

Meeting Date

Thursday 20 June 2024 - 11am (US eastern timezone EST) / 4pm (London, BST)

Zoom info

• Join Zoom Meeting
• Meeting ID: 969 4029 4948
• Passcode: 636931
• Dial-in:

  Country	International Dial-in	Toll-free Dial-in
  US	+1 929 205 6099 (New York)	877 853 5247
  UK	+44 330 088 5830	0800 031 5717
  France	+33 1 8699 5831	0 800 940 415
  Find your local number	https://zoom.us/u/ad2WVnBzb8

Meeting notices

• FINOS Project leads are responsible for observing the FINOS guidelines for running project meetings. Project maintainers can find additional resources in the FINOS Maintainers Cheatsheet.

• All participants in FINOS project meetings are subject to the LF Antitrust Policy, the FINOS Community Code of Conduct and all other FINOS policies.

• FINOS meetings involve participation by industry competitors, and it is the intention of FINOS and the Linux Foundation to conduct all of its activities in accordance with applicable antitrust and competition laws. It is therefore extremely important that attendees adhere to meeting agendas, and be aware of, and not participate in, any activities that are prohibited under applicable US state, federal or foreign antitrust and competition laws. Please contact [email protected] with any questions.

• FINOS project meetings may be recorded for use solely by the FINOS team for administration purposes. In very limited instances, and with explicit approval, recordings may be made more widely available.

• A Discussion Group has no direct decision-making power regarding the FDC3 standard - rather it is intended that anything they propose or work on will result in proposals (via Github issues and PRs) for the Standards Working Group participants to consider and vote on for inclusion in the standard.

Participation Requirements

Note: Meeting participants are expected to accept the terms of the FDC3 license (Community Specification License), understand the governance process and have a CLA in place.

Please click the following links at the start of the meeting if you have not done so previously.

• View the CSL
• View the GOVERNANCE of the Project
• Click here to start a PR.
  • Edit the page to add your details.
  • Hit the save button.
  • Click "Create Pull Request".
  • Click "Accept" on the EasyCLA dialog in the PR's discussion section.
• Click here to send email to become a voting participant on the FDC3 Project

Tracking Attendance

Note: Meeting participants are expected to add a comment to this GitHub issue in order that we can track attendance of FDC3 project meetings. Please do this at the start of the meeting.

Agenda

• Convene & roll call, review meeting notices (5mins)
• Review action items from the previous meeting (5mins)
• OSFF presentation on FDC3 for the Web
• Message schemas for Intent resolver, channel selector UI handling, intent resolution
• AOB & Adjourn (5mins)

Minutes

• @robmoffat reported that he was able to get his POC running in the FDC3 conformance framework with relatively minor changes and that it was passing most tests!
  • However, he needed to use an existing branch to avoid a few race conditions in main. Hence, the conformance framework needs looking at to make sure its maintainance is up to date.
  • There was some further discussion on making the conformance framework ready for a 2.2 release that supports FDC3 for the Web (if/when merged) and that there are desires to re-engineer it at a higher standard.
  • action item to be rolled over until @kriswest and @robmoffat confirm the status of the conformance framework.
• @robmoffat and @julianna-ciq have been working on the readme for the POC project to make it easier for others to get started with it.
• @kriswest mentioned the OSFF London presentation next week (26th June) on FDC3 for the Web
  • After OSFF, work will move to completing the PR for adding FDC3 for the web, as proposed, to the FDC3 Standard.
• @kriswest provided an overview of the additions to the proposed message schemas for handling iFrame based UIs for Channel Selectors, Intent resolvers and raised intent events (to be delivered to an app that has added an intent listener)
  • This is believed to be the last addition needed to the message schemas (bar error checking or unexpected ommissions that may be discovered during implementation).
  • The next step is for the POC to be refactored to start using the proposed schemas, before dividing it into code that needs to go into the FDC3 module and code that will form a reference implementation for a Desktop Agent. This is expected to start after OSFF
• @robmoffat related FINOS' desire to see FDC3 for the web completed and adopted in time for OSFF NY in October if possible.
  • @kriswest commented that the Standard addition and software don't necessarily get done at the same time, we often need to agree and adopt standard changes before software can be finalized, and that getting the standard part done in time seems very possible - but @robmoffat and @julianna-ciq (and any other participants we can recruit to help) might need to comment on the feasibility of getting the software done and compliant with the standard by that date..
• A participants asked a question about contribution and governance models (under AOB) + React Native and some discussion ensued that will continue in a github discussion or issue.

Action Items

• @kriswest make originatingApp argument in intent event schema optional (as that data is optional)

Rolled over:

• @kriswest to apply changes to deal with as many of the comments on the docs PR (FDC3 for Web specification #1191) as possible.
• @kriswest to ensure that a README and screencast video is provided on maintaining schemas and code generation.
• @robmoffat to seek out and recruit other potential POC collaborators
• @robmoffat to continue work on getting the conformance framework to run over the POC codebase and to connect with @kriswest to confirm race conditions and resolutions needed in the framework.

Untracked attendees

Full name	Affiliation	GitHub username

[kriswest]

Kris West / interop.io 🚀

[julianna-ciq]

Julianna Langston / interop.io 🐱

[robmoffat]

Rob Moffat / FINOS ⛵

[Lecss]

Alex Dumitru / Citi

[openfin-johans]

Johan Sandersson / Here (formerly OpenFin) 🎁

[pvoznyuk]

Pavlo Vozniuk @ RBC CM

[kziemski]

Kryspin Ziemski/ QCOMPUTE