Streaming Data

In an earlier comment, Julian Morrison suggested creating a server-side protocol. I agreed but said we need to do more work before we can publish something reasonable. I also pointed to an interesting bit of ongoing work, namely Opera's event streaming API, which Kim Burchett brought to our attention. I felt it was worth hoisting this from the comment section because I wanted to point out that APIs like this play directly to Flapjax's strength. Of course you can program against an API like this using callbacks (which would be implementing upcalls), but it'd be so much nicer to just bind to the data stream and let the language do the work—which, of course, is just what Flapjax would let you do.

For now we haven't built a binder to the Opera interface for three reasons: (1) we're not aware of much server-side support for it yet, (2) it doesn't appear to be a client-side standard either, and (3) there are some questions about its definition (as usual, Kim gets past the superficial and asks the relevant questions: see her message on the Opera site linked above). But the Internet is definitely moving in the direction of higher-level data abstractions, and we think Flapjax is well-suited to them.