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Discussion topics for the inaugural meeting of Ecma TC53 in Boston (USA) on 15-16 October 2018

03.10.2018

Discussion topics for the inaugural meeting of Ecma TC53 in Boston (USA) on 15-16 October 2018

The main goal of this first TC53 face-to-face meeting is to set priorities for the work of the committee moving forward. In some cases, this will lead to initial API development. In other cases, it may require additional research or outreach to additional experts.

On the evening of the first day (October 15), a “Scripts and Things” community event will be held to share the mission of TC53 with the JavaScript, IoT, and embedded communities of the greater Boston area. There will be demonstrations of relevant technologies. This will be a great opportunity for TC53 participants to experience first-hand the state of the art in JavaScript for Wearables and IoT. Please find below the topics to be discussed at this inaugural face-to-face meeting.

Discussion topics

1      ECMAScript/JavaScript language

  • Why focus exclusively on JavaScript?
  • Review statement to TC39 regarding JavaScript language
  • What is state of the art in embedded JavaScript?
  • Do we have language ideas to consider?
    • Feature detection (embedded device likely update engines slower than browsers)
    • Frozen realms
    • example of JSON parsing enhancement

2      Products

  • What do we want to enable that is different from today?
  • What is in scope for TC53 to improve for end users?

3      Apps for Things

  • What should this look like?
  • User experience
  • Developer experience
  • Sandboxing

4      Energy management

  • Options for managing power
  • API precedents?

5      Sensors

  • Needs
  • Configuration
  • Common units and data types
  • Vendor specific extensibility
  • W3C Sensors
  • Johnny-Five Robotics and IoT Platform
  • Low power operation

6      Communication – radios

  • Which physical transports do we consider appropriate for API development?
    • Wi-Fi
    • BLE
    • LoRa
    • LTE
    • Thread
    • etc.

7      Communication – protocols

  • Which network protocols do we consider appropriate for API development?

8      Security

  • What are the boundaries?
  • Secure storage
  • Secure communication
  • Crypto primitives
  • Interactions with hardware security
    • Secure boot
    • One-time programmable values
    • Accelerated cryptographic primitives

9      Displays

  • Kinds of user interfaces we want to support building
  • Breadth of hardware displays to address
  • Touch

10    Hardware targets boundaries

  • CPU performance
  • RAM
  • Flash
  • Floating point
  • Number of CPU cores

11    Privacy

How to design APIs to enable user control of their privacy?

12    Intellectual property rights policy

Is Ecma International Royalty-Free Patent Policy, also used by TC39, appropriate to adopt?
Are there other models to consider?

13    Design validation of proposed TC53 APIs

  • Vendor neutral – supports more than one distinct hardware target
  • Acceptable to target developers
  • Implement efficiently – memory, power, performance, code size
  • Consistency

14    Implementation testing

  • Regulatory conformance
  • API conformance
  • Energy use
  • Performance
  • Memory use
  • Language conformance

For more information: please contact Dr. Istvan Sebestyen, Secretary General of Ecma International. Email: istvan@ecma-international.org.