Alberto Mancini

A demo application of in-browser (plugin-free) computation; using WebRTC, WebGL, and NyARToolkit (compiled into JavaScript with GWT), the web app is capable of doing real-time video filtering and marker-based augmented reality.

This is the first sample of marker-based augmented reality in JavaScript, and, quite interestingly, the code can maintain 60+ fps on a common desktop computer running Chrome or Firefox.

Special care has been taken to let mobile devices run the application and, with just a few adjustments to the UI, Picshare is usable even on Android (unfortunately, mobile Safari does not support WebRTC, so there's no way to use it on iOS).

Picshare uses the Imgur API to store uploaded pictures and is hosted on Google App Engine.

As a side note, the code of the AR engine and the WebGL library used to build the application have been open-sourced and are available on Google Code: https://code.google.com/p/gwt-nyartoolkit/ and https://code.google.com/p/gwt-webgl/.

One of the best choices for developing mobile-ready web applications (HTML5) with GWT is MGWT (https://github.com/mgwt/mgwt). MGWT is a library that allows for interaction with touch events, AppCache, and gestures from Java and provides a lot of well-crafted mobile widgets.

As part of a teaching session for a company's development team, I worked as a consultant. I developed the adaptation of MGWT for Gecko devices (Firefox OS) to show the flexibility of the toolkit and let the developers experiment with the internals of a pretty complex library.

Nowadays, browsers support full-duplex communication channels that enable web applications to communicate in real time, but embedded devices are a growing source of data that frequently needs to be accessed via the web.

To showcase the interaction between a web application (written in GWT) and an MQTT server (the de facto standard for embedded device messaging), I developed this library that wraps the Paho JavaScript client (http://www.eclipse.org/paho/) and allows bidirectional real-time communication via websockets from Java code.

I gave a talk about using a web application to securely interact with OpenAFS volumes. In the talk, I describe the structure of the web app that stores credentials, as well as the changes to the Linux kernel module needed to enable secure token passing in a multi-threaded scenario.