Quick Start

In this tutorial, we will cover:

1. Gather required library.
2. A quick technology explanation.
3. Define the keyterms of the IWC.

Following this tutorial is a brief application example using the basic capabilities of data sharing in the IWC.

Gathering the IWC

To use the IWC in a Javascript application, the IWC client library is needed. The library can be gathered in the following ways.

Bower

   bower install ozoneplatform/ozp-iwc

When gathering the IWC through bower, the client library will be located at bower_components/ozp-iwc/dist/js/ozpIwc-client.min.js.

Include it in your applications HTML as so:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/bower_components/ozp-iwc/dist/js/ozpIwc-client.min.js"></script>

Github

Distributions of the IWC can be downloaded as a zip/tar.gz from the github releases page. In the unarchived directory, the library is located at /dist/js/ozpIwc-client.min.js.

Remotely

The 1.2.0 release of the IWC client library is available here on github at http://ozoneplatform.github.io/ozp-iwc/1.2.0/js/ozpIwc-client.js. The latest release is also regularly updated here on github at http://ozoneplatform.github.io/ozp-iwc/js/ozpIwc-client.js.

Technology overview

The IWC functions by having the IWC client, the script gathered using methods above, open a hidden iFrame to connection to an IWC bus, demonstrated in the following seciton, which will utilize the domain of the IWC bus for CORS (cross-origin resource sharing) purposes injuncture with HTML5 browser technology (SharedWorker/localStorage) to let applications act like they are sharing data through a server, but, there is no server and the data is just passed internal to the user's browser.

Terminology Breakdown

To develop application that use the IWC the following terms are important to know: IWC Client, IWC Bus, APIs, Resources, and References.

IWC Client

An IWC Client is an instantiation of the IWC client library within an application. Creating a connection is covered below, but a single client is needed for an application to utilize the IWC. Whenever a new ozpIwc.Client(...) is used in code, a new client is created.

The Client allows the application to make requests and receive responses/events from the IWC Bus.

IWC Bus

The IWC Bus is the Javascript that marshals around and contains the state of all the shared data and functionality of the IWC Clients.

The IWC Bus is created when the user's first IWC Client is instantiated. In other terms, when the first application that connects to a given IWC Bus is opened, the Bus is created. The Bus is created by IWC internals of the IWC Client and does not need to be handled by the application developer.

When all applications accessing a given IWC Bus are closed, the Bus is destroyed.

APIs

An API in the scope of the IWC is a subsection of the IWC Bus that governs and maintains information for various uses of the application. A piece of information an API maintains is called a Resource.

Data API

The Data API is the API of the IWC that manages shared data among applications.

Intents API

The Intents API is the API of the IWC that manages shared functions among applications*.

Resources

Resources are objects internal to the IWC Bus that applications request to interact with. These objects may contain a shared current value (Data API), or routing information for a shared function to be called (Intents API)

For example, stating "The bouncing ball application's client updates the shared data resource '/foo'" means that the given applications IWC Client makes a request to the Data Api to set the value stored in the Resource named "/foo". The naming convension for resources follows the relative pathing style of URLs for advanced IWC concepts covered later in these tutorials.

With an understanding of resources comes the last important term of the IWC, references.

References

A Reference is a instantiated class that links an application to a resource of an IWC API.

Since resources are internal to the IWC, an application wanting to access them does not have the visibility of the resources within their scope. In fact the resources aren't stored within the same HTML window.

In order for an application to interact with a resource it must create a reference to it. A reference instantiation holds a set of functions to let the application interact with the resource it reffers to.