Chrome and the Web APIs

25 Jan 2015

Browser is becoming better by the day and Chrome is at the forefront of this movement. There are a plethora of interesting Web APIs that will redefine the browser in the near future. It won’t be far wrong if we extended the Javascript prophecy to the browsers - ‘anything that can be done in a browser will be done in the browser in the future’, and it’s true to a large extent even now, i.e., Chromebook.

I recently came across Bluetooth API that landed in Chrome canary recently. It doesn’t do much right now, but, it’s a start. To see it in action:

1. I enabled the Enable experimental web platform features in chrome://flags for my local Chrome canary installation
   

2. Restarted the browser
   

3. Connected the phone to the mac via bluetooth
   

4. Opened Chrome developer tools and ran the following command:

navigator.bluetooth.requestDevice().then(
  function(d) {
   console.log('Found a device', d); 
  },
  function(e) {
  console.log('Exception', e); 
  }
);

It returned straight-away with the following output:

Found a device BluetoothDevice {instanceId: "E0:CB:EE:84:F7:C2"}

requestDevice() returns a promise and you can attach the appropriate resolve and reject callbacks with it.

That’s well and good, but what can I really do with this?

Just off the top of my head:

• take a phone call on your computer
• transfer data
• transfer audio
• …and lots more, in the future