Apps/StatusMeetings/Engineering/2012-08-15

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Details

  • Time: Wednesday, 2012 August 15, 9:05 - 9:55am PT (16:05 - 16:55 UTC)
  • Backchannel:
  • Virtual Location:
  • Physical Locations:
    • Mountain View: 4K - Kung Fu
    • San Francisco: 324 - Bay Bridge
  • Audio-only Access:
    • +1-650-903-0800 or +1-650-215-1282, x92, conf#: 98652 (US/INTL)
    • +1-800-707-2533, pin: 369, conf#: 98652 (US toll free)
  • etherpad for taking minutes

Agenda

  • Significant Updates
    • Intermittent Fire Alarm Tests
    • Changes in payment and identity strategy (Bill)
  • Checkin/Status on Major Challenges
  • Questions and Concerns
    • We really need to get our app developer docs up to date here
    • Web Activities - How do they work on Firefox OS with web apps?
    • myk: What is happening on August 28? What engineering work remains to do for that milestone?
    • Lots of stability problems with Firefox OS - need to be mindful in these apps decisions

Minutes

  • 9:04 Wil wins best wall color contest

Significant Updates

Fire Alam Tests

  • fire alarm tests will be happening in Mountain View from 9 - 9:30am PT this morning
  • might disrupt meeting

Payment and Identity Strategy

  • rfant has contacts at BlueVia
  • new strategy for payments
  • will work with third party that abstracts billing backends
  • we will integrate navigator.pay with single party
  • that party will integrate with various payment services
  • we were going to have a fragmented payment story
  • Paypal on some platforms, BlueVia on other platforms
  • rfant directing us to more unified approach to payments
  • positive change overall; easier for developers
  • Mozilla can act as broker to other payment providers
  • changes client-side code in Gecko
  • changes to Marketplace
  • changes to what we tell developers to do
  • this is what we were doing in the beginning
  • so we're actually farthest along on it
  • responsibility for identity shifts back to Mozilla
  • more likely to have Persona identities on all platforms
  • better experience for users
  • work has to be done on B2G, Marketplace teams
  • client-side work being done in Spain by BlueVia
  • our work is on navigator.pay API, which is mostly agnostic to payment provider
  • -> bwalker to communicate new Payment and Identity strategy to rest of organization
  • sicking worried about change that requires us to do more work
  • people who hadn't heard about the new strategy, at least: fabrice, sicking, overholt, myk, ndesaulniers, jsmith
  • -> pmpcat to forward rfant's email describing the new Payment and Identity strategy to folks who don't know about it

Android WebRT

  • on track to be done with v1 blockers by end of month

AITC

  • legal team on track to get privacy policy and terms of service for AITC in place by the end of the month

Checkin/Status on Major Challenges

Packaged Apps

  • status from last Thursday was that design discussions were going to happen
  • sicking hasn't yet scheduled a meeting
  • we decided to conduct discussion offline
  • cjones and clee needed for meeting on Updates page
  • https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/System/Updates (all "Open questions" sections)
  • -> pmpcat to convene meeting to design packaged apps
  • last Friday at noon PT cvan showed Marketplace progress on submitting packaged apps
  • we can currently do end-to-end API test
  • installPackage API has already landed; remaining work is around updates and signatures

Multiple Apps Per Domain

  • we had a productive session during work week
  • sicking described using profiles/datajars instead of origins as security boundary
  • benadida made bwalker have second thoughts and has reached out to sicking
  • the security documents aren't in a good state
  • sicking has edited them
  • but someone has edited his edits, and now they're hard to read
  • sicking plans to re-edit
  • engineers have expected to do this in v2
  • but BD folks say this is a blocker for developers
  • bwalker digging into the actual issue for developers
  • myk: our current decision is to do this in v2
  • we might change our minds, and bwalker is digging into how hard it really is for developers to work around the limitation
  • but we should proceed as if this is going to happen in v2 until we hear otherwise

B2G Basecamp Blockers

Questions and Concerns

We really need to get our app developer docs up to date

  • morgamic and others had meeting recently about it
  • working on updating docs, including removing stale docs and finding one place to put them all
  • we think jswisher owns making sure the docs are up-to-date
  • -> pmpcat to follow up with jswisher to confirm that she owns docs (or identify who does)
  • morgamic's team has started tracking documentation work that needs doing
  • a bunch of it needs to be written by developers who are currently working on finishing up development work
  • most Marketplace documentation bugs have owners, including all P1s

Web Activities - How do they work on Firefox OS with web apps?

  • specified in webapp manifest
  • runtime determines which one to call
  • runtime acts as broker between two apps
  • documented on wiki
  • anant has action item to add to spec
  • pdf.js is in B2G and has intent
  • when you click on link to PDF file in browser, it opens in pdf.js app
  • activities are available to all apps, not just browser
  • any app can start activity, DOM API
  • new Activity(...), returns object via which you can get info back from provider

Which of 317 apps in Marketplace are made for Android vs. B2G?

  • better asked in 10am meeting
  • Product Delivery meeting
  • not recommended for engineers unless there's a hot topic
  • leads should attend to know what product managers are planning
  • https://wiki.mozilla.org/Apps/StatusMeetings for details

myk: What is happening on August 28? What engineering work remains to do for that milestone?

  • bwalker would like to reduce the scope and keep the schedule
  • this is a burning topic for the Product Delivery meeting
  • sicking: there is no way B2G is going to be code-complete by the end of August
  • there are still hundreds of blockers open
  • August 28 is a Marketplace milestone
  • it's an engineering checkpoint
  • and it's for alignment with B2G, even if B2G itself doesn't make that milestone
  • to make sure Marketplace is aligned with B2G and Android
  • and test that our products are going to work
  • not a consumer/publicly-visible event

Lots of stability problems with Firefox OS - need to be mindful in these apps decisions

  • we need to be very careful about feature churn
  • lots of regressions on Firefox OS (video, etc.)
  • we need to get requirements ironed out, as more churn risks more regressions

rfant attending these meetings

  • rfant plans to attend to provide visibility into what's going on at the product/steering committee level
  • isn't in the office these days, probably won't be for a week or more
  • available, on email all day, happy to respond, please reach out!
  • making focused effort to get billing/identity straightened out
  • there's been confusion about Basecamp/Telefonica, what are we going to deliver and when
  • took a position, got buy-in from BlueVia/Telefonica
  • you will see changes associated with payment, billing, navigator.pay, identity, etc.
  • these just accelerate plans we already had for v2, avoid one-off we were planning to do for Brazil
  • will generate work, but better path forward
  • ask for your forebearance and flexibility as we work out details over the next week or so
  • people should feel free to respond directly to rfant on questions
  • try not to cc: the world; cc: the folks who are relevant
  • rfant happy to answer any questions

Actions

  • bwalker to communicate new Payment and Identity strategy to rest of organization
  • pmpcat to forward rfant's email describing the new Payment and Identity strategy to folks who don't know about it
  • pmpcat to convene meeting to design packaged apps
  • pmpcat to follow up with jswisher to confirm that she owns docs (or identify who does)
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