Needs feedback: Work on new "intents" spec

[François Revol]

Hi,

On -10/01/-28163 20:59, Jerome Leclanche wrote:
> Good evening list
> 
> During the past couple of weeks, I've been working on a spec for intents
> (best name I could come up with).
> 
> Intents are a way for applications to programatically describe what
> functions they are able to fulfill. They go hand-in-hand with MIME types,
> which describe on what type of content they are able to fulfill such
> functions.
> For example, while eog and Gimp may register the same MIME types, Gimp
> would have an "Image Editor" intent, while eog would have an "Image Viewer"
> intent.

Wow, that's an interesting idea...
that BeOS implemented 15y ago :D

It was called "suites" at the time, and yes, already included in the
MIME types namespace.
However it was mostly used for inter-app scripting at runtime.

cf.
http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/08-scripting/
https://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/using_scripting_in_haiku
http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/bible/bos/ch_scripting6.html

The API also included "verbs" however the only one ever defined was
B_OPEN. From your description it's probably more what you meant.

Sadly it was never used much, despite its great potential.
The android "intents" are just yet another iteration on the idea.

Haiku still uses the BeOS scripting API.

François.