XUPClient – A Thin Client for Rich Internet Applications

Abstract

With the help of rich web client technologies, developers are creating rich internet applications in response to end users’ growing demand in richer web experiences. However, most of these technologies are fat client based. That is, to enable rich user interfaces, application code, whether binary or script, must be downloaded and executed on the client side. In this paper, we propose a thin client based approach – XUPClient, a rich web client aimed at closing the gap between web and desktop user interfaces. It allows end users to interact with rich UI components only found in desktop environment, while remaining thin in terms of application logic; i.e. all application code resides on the server side, and the client only renders declarative UI definitions. XUPClient is built on top of the Extensive User Interface Protocol (XUP), a SOAP-based protocol for communicating events and incremental user interface updates on the web.