[whatwg] Application deployment

[Philipp Serafin]

On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 8:44 PM, Russell Leggett
<russell.leggett at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> I checked through the archives, but did not see anything, so if this has
> been addressed already, I apologize.
> This is a suggestion that is more helpful to larger single page web
> applications, but could also be very helpful to other resource intensive web
> pages. My thought is that it could be extremely helpful to create some kind
> of web application deployment format. Basically, the same idea as what java
> does with jars (Java ARchives). A jar is basically just a zip file with a
> different extension. Inside, it contains all the resources required for that
> application, including code and images.
> How hard would it be to support something similar in a browser? Instead of
> worrying about concatenating javascript and css files to reduce HTTP
> requests, if all js,css,and even images and other files could be zipped up
> or tarred, that would only require a single HTTP request. This could
> basically just add the files to the browser cache or other local storage
> mechanism so that requests for the resources would not need to make an extra
> trip.
> Thanks,
> Russ

I think for HTML, this is already covered by MHTML
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2557>. The problem here is probably to
bring more people to implement this one.

If a more generic approach is wished, how about this:
A new "archive" URI scheme, that works as follows:

Generic syntax: archive:(<URI to archive file>)/<path inside the archive>

The action would be:
 - recursively evaluate the URI in the first path and fetch the
specified resource;
 - if the received resource is in a supported archive format, search
for the file specified in the second part and extract it;

Possible examples:
archive:(http://example.com/~joe/mywebpage.rar)/index.html
archive:(ftp://example.com/applet.jar)/com.example.applet/core/App.class
archive:(archive:(http://example.com/~joe/app/build.tar.gz)/build.tar)/main.cpp