[sane-devel] Is there any plan to support Web Devices Services (WDS) protocol?

[Till Kamppeter]

On 02/05/2018 01:32 PM, Patrick Roncagliolo wrote:
> WDS is a protocol based on http connection with devices such as 
> scanners, printers and so on. Most of the work is based on a bunch of 
> XML schemas, that are publicly available on MSDN. Searched a lot, but 
> for Linux I only found this (https://github.com/al42and/WSDolefuls), 
> that fails to parse the scanner response, but succeeds to start the scan 
> job.
> I tried to search around SANE for WDS support, but I understood there 
> isn't.
> 
> Is there a technical motivation behind the lack of support for WDS? or 
> it's just not the top priority? Could it be possible to create a backend 
> for this protocol? A lot of Canon printers would work like a charm with 
> a single good implementation, and I think it would be the same with a 
> lot of modern hardware. I could try to start a simple implementation if 
> someone instructs me with the basics of the SANE internal API for 
> backends and working principles, I'm a student with (not much) free time 
> and it could be great to help a bit (and learn something) if possible.
> 

This looks like a second driverless (meaning no device/model-specific 
software or data (aka driver) required) scanning method after PWG's 
(Printer Working Group, http://www.pwg.org/) IPP Scanning which I 
mentioned in another post on this list.

It seems that WDS exists already for longer time and is already 
established, so that there are actually several scanners using it. Am I 
right? Which manufacturers are participating? Does it only work on 
network devices? Or only on USB? Does it only work on printer/scanner MF 
devices or also on stand-alone scanners?

Patrick, it would be great if you could make a SANE module for that. 
Another step to making a scanner as easy to connect under Linux as a USB 
stick. Also great for MF devices which happily print with PWG's 
driverless IPP printing but do not support IPP scanning.

    Till