Access smartphone sensors / address book from web app TODAY?

I want to give web applications running on foreign servers access to smartphone sensors and address book dat开发者_运维技巧a. The W3C is working on a spec for that, called the Device APIs. However, it is not finished yet, and it will probably take quite some time until browser vendors provide working implementations.

But I need this functionality NOW (for a proof of concept). I do not care about portability, Android would be enough. Requiring the user to install special software first would also be OK.

Two solutions come to my mind:

• Hack the APIs into the browser myself. Maybe I could take Phonegap and easily write a browser wrapper with it? That is, build a browser with Phonegap that exposes the Phonegap JS APIs to arbitrary sites (don't care about security for now)?
• Write a server and run it on the smartphone localhost. This server would provide access to the resources via HTTPS and OAUTH2 (for example). Web applications could then reference this localhost server in their code (HACK HACK .. are there security mechanisms that prevent an arbitrary site from accessing a server running on localhost?).

Suggestions welcome.

Use a WebView:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebView.html

This class is the basis upon which you can roll your own web browser

A WebView has several customization points where you can add your own behavior. These are:

Adding JavaScript-to-Java interfaces with the addJavascriptInterface(Object, String) method. This lets you bind Java objects into the WebView so they can be controlled from the web pages JavaScript.

You'd need to create an application that acts as the browser, (by implementing a custom WebView). Then in that application, create a java object for the web view that will fetch the sensor information. In the server output, write javascript that tests for and accesses this object.

For android, I believe you can expose custom local functionality to javascript either by wrapping a webview in your own lightweight "browser" application or by building a plugin for the supplied browser. As pointed out in this question How to develop plugins for the native Android browser there is an example in the sdk samples.

But I for one would be rather upset if you enabled a website to access my device's contacts, and would probably refuse to install your application on my device.