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 is capable of sustained 60+ fps on a common desktop computer running Chrome or Firefox.

Special care has been taken to let mobile devices to 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 Imgur API to store pictures taken and is hosted on a 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 googlecode: 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 (HTML5) applications in 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 a part of a teaching session for the development team of a company, I worked as a consultant. I developed the adaption 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 allow full-duplex communications channels that let web applications communicate in real time, but on the other hand, embedded devices are a growing source of data that frequently needs to be accessed through the web.

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

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