Building Communicating Web Applications Leveraging Endpoints and Cloud Resource Service

We describe a resource-based architecture to quickly and easily build communicating web applications. Resources are structured and hierarchical data stored in the server but accessed by the endpoint via the application logic running in the browser. The architecture enables deployments that are fully cloud based, fully on-premise or hybrid of the two. Unlike a single web application controlling the user's social data, this model allows any application to access the authenticated user's resources for application mash-ups, e.g., user contacts created by one application are used by another on permission from the user instead of the first application. We present a Rtisy, a platform to further simplify web application development by using pre-built communication widgets for common use cases such as phone call, conferencing, call distribution and video publish or play. The architecture extends beyond web to native applications and reduces the barrier between web and non-web applications for communication. Our resource access protocol acts as a generic signaling mechanism for the emerging WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communications). We have implemented several applications completely in HTML5 running in the browser using this resource-based architecture.