Google software engineer James Hawkins recently blogged about Google’s Web Intents system–a method of piping data between different Chrome web apps, similar to how Android apps can share data, if the user agrees to do so when they install the apps.
Web Intents is a great thing, as developers can create apps which don’t have to be specifically designed to work with other apps–but other apps can still access their data. As an example, Google mentioned a photo-sharing website that allows users to be able to manipulate photos that are on the site by enabling an “edit intent” using the Web Intents API.
Although Web Intents will only work within the Chrome web browser, Google and Mozilla are joining hands to create a single API that would work across browsers. Google Chrome Developer Advocate Paul Kinlan recently released an open source JavaScript shim that allows the use of Web Intents on current versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera and IE 8 and 9.
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