Delta Communication: The Power of the Rich Internet Applications

Abstract

I. INTRODUCTIONRich Internet Applications (RIAs) are very complex Web based systems [1], [2]. RIAs are encompassed with various types of components, integrated in diverse ways, making the RIAs more complex systems [3]. Numerous Technologies and Techniques (TTs), frameworks, libraries, and tools had been introduced over the last decade for the development of these components of RIAs [4]. However, these TTs, frameworks, libraries, and tools do not improve the fundamental concepts in the core of the RIAs [2], and the complexity remains due to the lack of realization of the abstract architectural formalism of the RIAs. Moreover, these TTs may introduce new layers of complexity and learning curves into development. Therefore, in the terms of the complexity, the advancement of TTs and tools does not provide much assistance.Even though lots of tools had been introduced and many researches had been conducted in the domain of RIAs, still few researches have focused on the abstract fundamental concepts of the RIAs; and standard definitions for these concepts have still not been articulated [5]. Definitions of the concepts provide precise common understanding of the subject towards proper utilization of the concept. If we can realize the fundamental abstract (by the means of TTs independent) architectural elements of RIAs and their characteristics well enough and strongly define them, the complexity can be reduced; since the complexity encloses the difficulties in understanding the software systems [6].Our ongoing research intends to reduce the complexity of the RIAs by identifying the fundamental abstract architectural elements of RIAs, specifying their characteristics, and introducing terms and definitions for them; in the direction of introducing an abstract architectural style for RIAs. This paper focuses on the rich communication model of the RIAs, which can be seen as the power of the RIAs (This is further discussed in section III). This rich communication model has two communication modes according to the direction of the data transmitted: 1) data-pull and 2) data-push. In data-pull mode, the client requests and fetches data (or pulls data) from the server, based on the traditional request-response model. In data-push mode, the server-components push the data to the client-component(s) when needed, without receiving a request from the client. In this paper we focus only on the data-pull mode.This paper discusses the fundamental characteristics of the rich communication model of the RIAs, as identified through the literature survey and empirical evidence gained from a series of experiments; then proposes a definition, indicating the limitations of the general term "Asynchronous Communication", which is currently used to denote this rich communication model. Based on this definition, the paper also delivers a term and a definition for the simplest abstract technique, which can be implemented using this rich communication model; which is exploited in the popular technique named Asynchronous Javascript And Xml (AJAX) [7...

Rich Web-based Applications: An Umbrella Term with a Definition and Taxonomies for Development Techniques and Technologies

“…The rich communication model of the RIAs is called Delta Communication (DC), with three main characteristics: 1) capability of processing in background, which helps in partial page rendering, 2) faster communication than the communication used in web-based application, which leads to improving the responsiveness by eliminating the workwait pattern, and 3) support for development of the features in both synchronous and asynchronous processing [3].…”

“…The basic model of the DC is called Simple Pull Delta Communication (SPDC) model, which is defined as "the basic abstract Delta-Communication technique, based on the data-pull mode. It describes the simplest form of datapull Delta-Communication, based on the request-response model; and this technique is technology independent" [3]. The JavaScript (JS) implementation of the SPDC -which is called the "JavaScript-based Simple Pull Delta-Communication" (JS-SPDC) -is the simplest implementation of the SPDC, which is commonly known as Asynchronous Javascript And XML (AJAX) [3].…”

“…After the introduction of AJAX/XHR [30] (SPDC [3]), the concept of the DC had been applied in some other TTs for both data pull and push modes, and each TT is associated with its own set of pros and cons [31]. These DC TTs can be mainly classified under data-pull and data-push modes.…”

“…Early prototypes were mainly browser-based applications, developed using HTML, JavaScript (JS), and PHP. The derived concepts, such as Simple Pull Delta Communication (SPDC) [3], were tested later using different server-side TTs like JAVA and .NET, and also tested for different other types of applications like mobile apps.…”