Support the production of Desktop Agent Bridging

[lspiro-Tick42]

Enhancement Request

Extend the FDC3 API's to improve support for producing bridges between FDC3 implementations aka Desktop Agents.

In this context an FDC3 Bridge would allow an application running on one Desktop Agent, to be able to integrate with FDC3 applications running on a second Desktop Agent for the same user.

The interop between applications running on different Desktop Agents aka Platforms would ideally cover

• Channels
• Intents
• Application Launching

Use Case:

1. A Client has two Desktop Agent environments running on their desktop and wants to be able to raise an intent from an application running on Desktop Agent 1 (say Glue42) and the intent is implemented on Desktop Agent2 (say OpenFin).

2. A similar use case occurs `round User Selected channels, where a user wants to see applications running on the 'same channel' from the multiple desktop agents, synchronise on a common symbol.
   NB This assumes that from a user PoV a red channel on Platform is the same as a red channel on Platform 2.

3. An existing platform, say a Terminal offers interop between its applications using its own (non FDC3) API's. It wants to allow applications running on other Platforms to interwork with apps running on the Terminal. This could be acheived by delivering a Bridge for whatever Platforms a user may be running.

Additional Information

If this use case is accepted we can imagine two implementations, either adding a few extra API methods (for which change requests will be added) or by defining a Desktop Agent to Agent interop bus/api. But our view of the agenet to agent API is that it is too big a change.

[kriswest]

Consense reach at #481 that this issue is within the FDC3 charter and that work should be undertaken to achieve it.
Possible approaches to be presented at SWG next meeting.

[kriswest]

A discussion group is being started up to discuss and develop proposals to resolve this issue:

• Desktop Agent Bridging Discussion group #523

[saurabhguptanwm]

Addditional Usecase

1. A client has 2 monolithic application created in C# and wants to send a FDC3 Context or Intent from one app to another.

2. A client with 2 machines has 1 monolithic applcation running on Machine 1 and Desktop Agent (say Finsemble) running on Machine 2 and client would like to exchange context or Intent with each other.