There's a lot of focus on mobility and the cloud when it comes to the Internet lately and for good reason, both devices and wireless connection speeds and availability, make the Internet on the go a real possibility. This mobility, though, means that people are expecting their data to be available regardless where they access it, at work, at home or on mobile devices. This poses the most problems for traditional 'static' software like most apps, including web browsers.

Mozilla's solution to the problem is dubbed Weave Sync, an add-on for Firefox which aims to make it easy to access your bookmarks, tabs and preferences over different Firefox installs. Weave Sync 1.0 was released about a week ago and Mozilla now wants third-party developers to get involved so it’s launching a set of tools and APIs to make this possible.

"This week we’re launching the first set of developer resources including Weave Sync & User APIs, documentation, and Python & Javascript client libraries — to increase the number of places where you can securely access, and have your personal data readily available to you, independent of whether or not Firefox is available," Mozilla developers Ragavan Srinivasan and Mike Hanson wrote.

"This first set of APIs focuses on enabling Weave clients to provide user’s access to their stored data from other devices and environments. Future APIs will provide third-party web sites and applications the ability to request permission and obtain explicit access only to specific user data to augment a users’ Web experience," they explain.

And to show off the new resources and APIs available to developers, Mozilla also released several tools/tech-demos showcasing the capabilities of the developer tools but also exemplifying some use cases. One example is a web-based client for Weave, written in JavaScript, which enables you to view the data stored on the Weave servers. Not much use for regular folks, other than to see what exactly Weave 'knows' about you, but a good example for developers.

There is also an iPhone app as well as a WebOS one for Palm Pre and Pixi smartphones. Both apps serve as Weave client which enables you to view the data stored in the cloud. Finally, there's a command-line client, written in Python, for the true geeks. None of the tools are of much use for regular users, but they are aimed at developers so that's to be expected. It will be interesting to see what third-parties will come up with to take advantage of the data now available.


Weave Sync 1.0 for Firefox is available for download here.