Data binding for standard-based web applications

Development frameworks have proven to drive developer productivity and flourish in a variety of different application domains. For example, data binding frameworks supporting the process of associating User Interface (UI) elements and data objects can reduce implementation efforts significantly. Even so desktop application developers have access to a myriad of data binding frameworks (e.g. Eclipse JFace); Web development still lacks decent data binding framework support. Therefore, we devised a WebSocket-based Data-binding (WebSoDa) framework which is capable of easing the cumbersome and error-prone task of coupling UI elements with their respective data objects. Besides providing a Microdata-based data binding language, the WebSoDa framework embraces the WebSocket protocol. We show that the network traffic in data binding scenarios can decrease considerably by applying a WebSocket-based framework instead of a conventional AJAX approach.