Re: Lazy Blob

On Thu, 2 Aug 2012, Glenn Adams wrote:
> >
> > I don't really care about the XHR side of this (happy to let Anne 
> > figure that out), but since WebSockets was mentioned: what's the use 
> > case that involves Web Socket? I don't really understand what problem 
> > we're trying to solve here.
> 
> i would like to support two use cases:
> 
> (1) simple - single blob send, single blob response
> (2) multiple - multiple instances of simple, i.e., send/response pairs

Sorry, I was vague. What I mean is what user-facing problem is it that 
we're trying to solve? For example, "I have a real-time game that needs to 
send commands to the server from the client and needs to receive updates 
from the server to the client, where latency is not a big issue (it's 
turn-based or tick-based with widely-spaced ticks) but where reliability 
is paramount (dropping a message would mean the state was inconsistent)" 
would be a use case for Web Sockets. That use case could be more simply 
described as "I want to write a chess game as a Web app". Another use case 
for Web Sockets could be "I want to write an instant messaging application 
in my Web page", or "I want the view of the data that my application shows 
to update in place when the server notices that it has changed".

Notice the lack of any mention of specific solutions in the use case 
descriptions -- it's just a high-level problem statement, typically one 
that even an end-user could actually understand (or at least that a 
programmer could understand, even if they were not familiar with the Web).

What's the use case that is driving the ideas discussed in this thread in 
the context of Web Sockets?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 2 August 2012 07:04:43 UTC