BigBison
July 21st, 2006, 16:20
Web 2.0 combines a desire for increasing interactivity and responsiveness in Web applications, together with a desire to drive an exponentially growing source of applications through component-based (e.g. “mash-up”) rather than monolithic design methods. Interactivity and responsiveness result largely from asynchronous programming methods where the traditional page replacement design is replaced by enhanced client-side processing and incremental server interactions. Server interactions may either refresh data or presentation controls, without the disruption in end-user experience caused by complete page replacement. Component-based designs have resulted from the increasing trend of web authors to expose APIs within their client-side code, allowing for downstream (i.e. after page-generation) extension of those components with value-added data or presentation elements – not anticipated or controlled by the original page author.
There are a number of efforts underway in the W3C today that are oriented toward increasing web application responsiveness and/or toward supporting composition-based programming models. The Web Apps APIs WG has in its charter extensions to XMLHTTP, the backbone of AJAX applications. XForms has an asynchronous <submission> element which similarly is used to incrementally refresh content between its data model and the server. This paper proposes that there are a number of such common building blocks underlying web application design that cut across boundaries of working groups, boundaries of namespaces (XHTML, XForms, SVG, VoiceXML, etc), and that cut across boundaries of procedural (e.g. scripting) vs. declarative programming styles. By working toward a common definition of those building blocks, which we call a “rich web application backplane” we can support a more pluggable and composable infrastructure for web developers, without constraining their choice of namespace or programming technology, and hence accelerate the ecosystem of web 2.0 developers.
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/2006/backplane/
There are a number of efforts underway in the W3C today that are oriented toward increasing web application responsiveness and/or toward supporting composition-based programming models. The Web Apps APIs WG has in its charter extensions to XMLHTTP, the backbone of AJAX applications. XForms has an asynchronous <submission> element which similarly is used to incrementally refresh content between its data model and the server. This paper proposes that there are a number of such common building blocks underlying web application design that cut across boundaries of working groups, boundaries of namespaces (XHTML, XForms, SVG, VoiceXML, etc), and that cut across boundaries of procedural (e.g. scripting) vs. declarative programming styles. By working toward a common definition of those building blocks, which we call a “rich web application backplane” we can support a more pluggable and composable infrastructure for web developers, without constraining their choice of namespace or programming technology, and hence accelerate the ecosystem of web 2.0 developers.
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/2006/backplane/