[vworld-tech] Web Browser as Interactive Client

[Kwon J. Ekstrom]

I've been interested in having a connection based Web-Application for a 
while.  Ever since a discussion on Mud-Dev a few years back.  I've 
written a quick proof of concept in VB using the IE com component that 
read xml data from the server and interpreted it to modify the DOM.

It was pretty weak, but it proved that it was a valid concept.  I 
dropped the vb project shortly thereafter.  The lastest incarnation is 
as a XUL application for Mozilla based on Chatzilla.  ATM it doesn't do 
anything except connect and output directly to the browser, but once I 
have the time to devote towards learning XUL a little better I should 
have something up.

Basically what I'm hoping to do is allow the ability to append or set 
the content of an element, or modify any attribute.  Additionally I'd 
like to pass onArrive events to an element(so a script can interpret raw 
xml data), and send link clicks, and form data to the server. 
Additionally I'm hoping to include xslt support for append and set 
operations.

The combination above should allow for a robust client... it's on the 
backburner for now.  Just had to comment.

At work I've written pullback scripts using SOAP.  Basically the user 
clicks on a link and that sends SOAP HTTP request to the server for some 
additional data.  It'd be small work to write a poll loop in the 
background.  (IE only but Mozilla does support SOAP)

-- Kwon J. Ekstrom