Visual programming has a long history. See Nassi-Shneiderman-Diagram's, which are even a German (Now eu) DIN standard. And you have Drakon from the Russian space program.
Back in the day, XS4ALL, a Dutch internet provider had exactly this feature. They provided ssh access via port 80. It saved me a couple of time while I was traveling and the only way to get internet access was via hotel WiFi, which blocked everything except port 80. If anybody from XS4ALL is reading this... Thanks!
The paradox of KISS is that it makes things simpler... for the designers. Because they don't have to think about the cognitive psychology aspects of their work.
Yes indeed. We also have something not more similar to what liveview offers. It is here: https://github.com/mmzeeman/zotonic_mod_teleview. It is based on mqtt, and the views are updated with normal html like templates. This makes it possible for frontenders with html and css knowledge to contribute to a project with a rich SPA like interface.
MQTT is a proven protocol. It's design started started more than 20 years ago. The protocol was designed to be easy to implement. It is simple to implement if you want. There are multiple brokers, and client libraries available. So why invent a new protocol, when an open, standardised protocol already exists.
Open pages in a browser are not that different from IoT devices.
Very interesting. I've implemented something similar. It evolved out of the co-browsing solution I developed for the company I work for.
The solution uses mqtt. Clients subscribe to a topic on the server, and the server publishes patches to update the view. Patches can be incremental (patch against the last frame), cumulative (patch agains the last keyframe) or a new keyframe. It allows for server side rendered views. Multiple clients can subscribe to the same view and keep in sync. See: https://github.com/mmzeeman/zotonic_mod_teleview
The best way to do pub/sub on the web with a standard protocol is MQTT (https://mqtt.org). It supports websockets, it scales, supports authentication, can handle unreliable networks.
We use it exclusively for the soon to be released 1.0 version of Zotonic. See: https://test.zotonic.com (running on a 4.99 euro Hetzner vps).
We developed an independent support javascript library called Cotonic (https://cotonic.org) to handle pub/sub via MQTT. This library can also connect to other compliant MQTT brokers. Because MQTT is fairly simple protocol, it is fairly easy to integrate in existing frameworks. Here is an example chat application (https://cotonic.org/examples/chat) which uses the open Eclipse broker.