XForms and Web sockets

At the Balisage conference yesterday, there was an interesting
paper [1] by Zahra Al-Awadai, Anne Brüggemann-Klein, Christina 
Grubmüller, and Philipp Ulrich of the TU Munich about using 
the XML technology stack to create graphical user interfaces;
among other things, they discussed contexts which require the
server to push information to the client in a way that does not
jibe easily with the statelessness of HTTP.

[1] https://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol23/html/Bruggemann-Klein01/BalisageVol23-Bruggemann-Klein01.html

Philipp Ulrich reported in particular on work towards encapsulating
the web sockets functionality of current browsers into an XML
element which provides a declarative packaging for the web sockets
the team need for their server-push functionality.

Afterwards (and again in discussion this morning), John Boyer
and the authors and I got interested in whether and how it would
be possible to integrate this kind of functionality into XForms.
(The current work is independent of earlier work at TUM which
used XForms, and the web-socket element is not currently
integrated into any XForms environment.)

Much of the existing machinery of XForms is relevant here and
could be reused.  

The web socket could of course raise an XForms event when
it receives a message from the server; since the message may be
XML, I might want it to update or be appended to an instance
in my model (which seems to make the web socket behave a bit
like a submission which is triggered not by a user action but by 
an event of some other kind.

I hope that the WG (and implementors!) will be interested and 
will take some time to consider whether web sockets could be 
integrated into the spec.  


********************************************
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies LLC
cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com
http://www.blackmesatech.com
********************************************

Received on Thursday, 1 August 2019 15:42:23 UTC