SVGTerm: Building A vector-graphics web app with Perl and SVG.pm

SVGTerm: Building A vector-graphics web app with Perl and SVG.pm

By Ronan Oger
Date: Thursday, 24 July 2003 17:40
Duration: 20 minutes
Language:

SVG is an XML vocabulary which describes images on a canvas using the
Painter's model (last entry on top, first entry on bottom).

That's great. Throw on top of this the fact that SVG supports scripting, and
hence it supports dynamic events. All from a single scripting API which
includes a DOM API. Now we can manipulate images on the client. Just like
dhtml. wow. We've hit the late 90s.

But it's not the 90s anymore. Today, most SVG-capable implementations also
support javascript-driven socket connections to the source server. So now
dynamic content on the client can generate events on the server.

So now, we're talking. We have the ability to round-trip data using client
events without requiring a refresh from the browser. And we can do this by
manipulating primitives. basically like X.

So let's get started. Let's do something fun and perlish.

We're all droubled perl coders here. One way or another, we're geeks. So
let's get a little bit more hardcore. What's more geeky than building our
own xterm. Except that we don't want to use any client-side code that's
unavailable on a standard PC. And of course, we want it secure.

Let's get a little bit more hardcore, and stick an ssh client in all this.

Now, we've got something resembling cool... An xterm which we can safely use
to do ssh sessions from any internet café.