Transport: C++ WebSocket client

[ibgreen]

• Add ability for deck.gl-native C++ code to listen deckl.gl JSON style messages arriving over a WebSocket.
• A simple web socket server (could be Node.js based)
• Boost.Beast and Networking TS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FQwAjELMek

[isaacbrodsky]

When you say WebSocket, are you intending to use that just because it is a convenient transport protocol? Is there something specific you envision on the other end of it that would indicate WebSockets?

Other options could be:

• Native application listens for HTTP POST requests (possibly easy but sacrifices server push channel)
• Read stdin or other file stream (easy to script but less useful)
• Raw JSON-over-TCP (hard because clients are all 100% custom) or UDP (still 100% custom + hard because of fragmentation issue)

[ibgreen]

Yes good question. Not all use cases are clear yet, but this is part of the "transport protocol" vision, as one of the main ways to hold together a growing family of deck.gl clients and renderers.

I was thinking that we would make one implementation of the transport API that is web socket based, and we would be able to interchange the web client and the native client against a common server.

But we could certainly support other transport implementations. We need "full duplex" for full functionality (back-channel for events, rendered textures etc), but we could still do half-duplex (i.e HTTP) implementations with limited functionality.