[webapp]: SCION WebView Idea

[martenwallewein]

Hi all,
after working on the shttp proxy PR #142, we had the idea to bring our video streaming setups, based on this proxy, into scion-apps. To do so, I implemented a raw prototype to make HTTP/3 requests over SCION and display the results in scion-apps (as far as the browser can display them). This prototype looks like this:

We plan to provide a DVB-T2 live stream over SCION that can be accessed via this feature. Furthermore, we hope that it could be an entrypoint for providing more resources via HTTP/3 over SCION.

So before implementing this feature completely and creating a PR, I hope we can use this issue for feedback, discussion and opinions about it.

Best,
Marten

[matzf]

Hi Marten, thanks for this description and the prototype!

Having something visible in the browser would definitely be great.
Instead of building this as a feature of the webapp, I would perhaps first look at building a simple, stand-alone http proxy that can be directly used by the browser. Using a Proxy auto-config script, would make setup easy for users and allow to limit the proxy to requests that will actually use SCION.
A possible downside here would be that the browsers will reject SCION addresses as malformed URLs -- a simple workaround could be to just limit to using hostnames only, or devise a suitable scheme for the user to enter mangled addresses.

Note that this proxy would need to be a simple forward proxy, not the reverse proxy that you've added in #142.

What do you think?

[martenwallewein]

Hi Matthias,

I like the idea of integrating SCION HTTP directly in the browser, not as part of scion-webapp, the proxy auto config approach looks promising. Maybe this can be combined with a small SCION browser extension, to allow scion addresses or maybe even a scion:// scheme, I know that this is possible, but I cannot oversee the effort to realize this. Nevertheless, I think realizing at this approach would be very beneficial, integrating it into webapp may be the "plan-b", we will see. I will do some research and testing about that and write down the results here, thanks for the help!

[matzf]

A super simple implementation of what I suggested above was added in #181.

[martenwallewein]

I see, nice one! I also thought to start with this PAC approach, but didn't manage to take time for this. However, this one looks like a good starting point for further progress.