During 2007 and 2008, it became increasingly apparent that the future direction and success of the mobile web could be harmed without a concerted effort to drive a standardized approach to how web applications access the key local capabilities on the mobile device. If web applications had to use different APIs (for the same capability) on different devices and platforms, then development of web applications which work on any mobile device would not happen. On top of this, the risk of malicious web applications having free access to local mobile capabilities is unacceptable. Therefore, a need to create some form of security layer to protect the user from harm was essential.
It is with this background that OMTP launched its BONDI project with the aim of acting as a catalyst to drive the standardization of a small set of key interfaces from web services to mobile devices and also to put in place a well understood and user controlled security policy with which to protect the user.
BONDI technology has moved into the Wholesale Applications Community and will be developed further within that organisation.
BONDI (as of 30th June 2010) consists of several activities listed below.
Interface Requirements – A high level definition of the BONDI interfaces which include a dynamic API which is remotely updateable once the device is in the field
Security and Architecture requirements – Requirements for BONDI architectural constraints and for the security policy which protects the user from harm
API specifications – A set of Doxygen generated HTML pages that define the syntax and semantics of the BONDI APIs
Security Policy DTD – An interoperable XML description of the security policy which defines the access that a particular web application and widget will have to the BONDI APIs.
Reference Implementation (RI) – The RI is a real concrete example (using Windows Mobile as the platform) of how the interfaces and security specifications should be implemented. The RI SDK contains API documentation and example code – the initial alpha release is available here.
Compliance Criteria – A set of criteria which may be used to judge compliance of implementation against the defined standard and RI.
The BONDI Reference Implementation was created as an Open Source project. The use of real code in an RI ensures that other implementations for different devices and platforms can be tested and declared compliant against well defined criteria.