Re: Seeking WebSocket proposal team

> On 23 Oct 2016, at 23:24, bergi <bergi@axolotlfarm.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Matthias,
> 
> Am 23.10.2016 um 22:32 schrieb Kovatsch, Matthias:
>> Hi Bergi
>> 
>> Thinks for the input. First of all, we should elaborate how
>> "streaming triples/quads" is interesting for WoT. The primary
>> communication part for now is the interaction with Things of
>> different IoT platforms. That means reading out data or sending
>> control commands -- opposed to the transfer of metadata. I would like
>> to focus first on this messaging for interaction with/among Things.
> 
> I'm talking about the actual data, not metadata (e.g. continuous
> temperature measurement). JSON-LD (triples/quads) must be used,
> otherwise, the schema information is lost.
> 
> But if you don't want to use it for streaming, what would be the benefit
> of WebSocket at all?



WebSockets is of interest as one of the few protocols that can be used directly from web page scripts. This is important as a means to use the Web for the human machine interface for services for the Web of things. In my work, a web page script makes use of a JavaScript library to create proxies for remote things, and interact with those things as if they were local to the browser. 

WebSockets has the benefit of supporting bi-directional asynchronous messaging, something that is very useful for interaction with things, e.g. for streaming updates from a remote thing to a proxy created as part of a web page script, for signalling events, including thing lifecycle events, and for asynchronous responses to actions.

I implemented this as part of a NodeJS + web page script over a year ago as part of the following project:

     https://github.com/w3c/web-of-things-framework

The WebSockets bindings are described in:

     https://github.com/w3c/web-of-things-framework/blob/master/bindings.md

I am now picking this work up again and hope to get back up to speed with it over the next few weeks.

—
   Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org <mailto:dsr@w3.org>>