BONDI 1.1 is now in Candidate Release and it is open to public for feedback.

Note that this phase will close on the 2nd of December so you’ll need to get your comments in before then.

See OMTP and BONDI at the betavine website.

What is BONDI?

In short BONDI is a set of specifications, reference implementation and compliance criteria for the creation of mobile web apps based on Widgets.

This means that BONDI widgets rely on the web-runtimes or browser as its execution environment. BONDI defines a set of APIs that provides BONDI widgets with access to the handset functionality such as access to camera, contacts and location information.

The BONDI official website contains all the information you need to learn more.

From the BONDI website:

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 consists of several activities, each of which interacts and as a whole builds towards the aim defined above.

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.

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 has been created as an Open Source project. This enables both OMTP Members and Participants as well as non members to collaborate on the creation of a rapidly iterating and testable implementation in a public arena. The use of real code in a RI ensures that other implementations for different devices and platforms can be tested and declared compliant against well defined criteria.

ceo