Presenting ifmap.js and jsmap

I’ve spent the past six months as a contractor with Infoblox in Santa Clara California working on projects related to IF-MAP, a client/server protocol for network-connected devices. I should have written a post describing the protocol long ago, but I wanted it to be entertaining and have pretty pictures which ended up deterring me from ever starting. So for the purposes of this post it’s enough to say that a MAP server is pretty much just a graph database with publish, search and subscribe operations, and a MAP client uses the IF-MAP protocol to perform those operations. The IF-MAP protocol itself is really just a specific SOAP format built on top of HTTPS as a transport layer.

So with that little bit of background, I’m announcing the open-source release of two related software projects: ifmap.js and jsmap. I’ll describe each briefly below. See the README documents in each project’s repository for more information.

ifmap.js

ifmap.js is an IF-MAP client library implementation in JavaScript. It depends on jQuery’s $.post(), $.each() and $.proxy() functions. Due to browsers’ same-origin policy a JavaScript IF-MAP client can’t send requests directly to a remote MAP server. All requests must be sent through a proxy, sold separately. For a simple example of how this might work, see…

jsmap

jsmap uses ifmap.js to build an actual IF-MAP client that runs in the browser. You can point and click to build IF-MAP requests, submit them to a MAP server and see the responses. Requests are proxied through a simple Sinatra application.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome. Just send me an email; my address is pretty easy to find. For more information about IF-MAP see ifmapdev.com/documentation and join the ifmapdev Google Group.