Rosbridge - thoughts on rebranding/naming?

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Hey all,

In the WebTools working group, we’ve been discussing how the current rosbridge naming is a little bit confusing, especially with ros1_bridge in the mix now.

One major thought was to separate the name of the protocol from the name of the client/server implementations. Some top candidates to illustrate the thinking:

  1. Call the protocol rwtp ROS Web Transport Protocol
    • Have something like ros-websocket-server (device-side) and ros-websocket-client (browser-side) applications that know how to speak this protocol, but are separated from its definition. Other transport layers could be used as long as they speak the same protocol.
  2. Call it ros-web-bridge to differentiate from ros1_bridge
  3. Name the protocol ROS-JSON
  • Never change it! (rosbridge forever)
  • RWTP (ROS Web Transport Protocol)
  • ros-web-bridge
  • ROS-JSON
  • Something else (all of the above are bad options)

0 voters

On a related note - we’re also thinking about how to structure the client-side libraries for best usability. We think it makes sense to move in the direction of more atomic functionalities, similar to how the ROS 2 core is working. roslibjs is a great tool, but it does a lot of things, and we think it may make sense to break it up into separate NPM-released packages, like:

  • transport (see rmw/rcl)
  • client (see rclcpp - the user-friendly API that can have transport swapped out)
  • math
  • TF
  • URDF

Some of the above set could then be considered a “ros-web-core” subset of a wider ecosystem that includes more utility libraries, modular GUI components, end applications, and so on.

This is pretty open-ended, but we’re just trying to start the conversation, not finish it :slight_smile:

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