Qworum — The Service Web

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Specification

You can either directly jump to the Qworum specification, or first read the following in order to get some context about what Qworum is trying to achieve.

Demonstration

This video shows an online shop calling a remote shopping cart service.

Use this demo live on shop.demo.qworum.net.

Visit the GitHub repository as a starting point for your project.

This sample e-shop is a Qworum application and the shopping cart is a remote Qworum service. A payment processing service will be implemented later on. Demo status: alpha.

Note that:

• with Qworum the user experience is similar to the current Web, with the exception that the browser's back button will be disabled.
• search engines can't peek inside Qworum services, so if search engine optimization (SEO) is important for you then you might want to carefully consider which parts of your application will be implemented as Qworum services. For enterprise and business applications SEO is generally not an issue, but consumer applications such as an online shop might want to only use remote Qworum services and limit the use of internal Qworum services to the parts that should remain out of reach for search engines.

A platform for distributed web applications

There are currently two different Webs that exist on the World Wide Web:

• The Document Web: This the Web that most Web developers will be familiar with. The primary type of content is the HTML page, and the primary content consumers are human users rather than machines.
• The Semantic Web: This the Web that is intended for machine consumption rather than human consumption. The primary type of content is RDF and its various encodings such as JSON-LD and Turtle.

Qworum adds another type of Web to the mix: the Service Web. Qworum is used for providing software rather than content. Qworum services are:

• Interactive: They can interact with end-users through HTML pages.
• Composable: They can call other Qworum services, and even themselves. And Qworum services can return data to their callers. A Qworum application, on the other hand, is simply a Qworum service that does not have a caller.

Note that although Qworum is distinct from the two previous Webs, it builds on them:

• User interaction occurs through HTML pages. End-users will barely notice that they are using Qworum rather than the Document Web.
• Qworum services can return semantic data to their callers, in addition to conventional data such as XML-wrapped JSON or any other XML data.

Use cases

The main use cases for Qworum are:

• Application integration: Different Web-based applications can provide Qworum services to each other and provide a seamless user experience that combines both applications.
• Productivity gains when developing web applications: An interactive service needs to be implemented and made available on the Web only once. All Web applications can then leverage that service and spare countless development hours.

Qworum is widely applicable. If an online service is interactive, then it can benefit from using Qworum. Here is a foretaste of the types of services that Qworum can enable:

• User authentication
• Payment processing
• Collection management — shopping cart, addressbook/contacts, movies, files, customer information, supplier information, …

You may ask yourself: "Web applications can already use third-party services through remote API calls, how is Qworum better?". The answer is that currently third-party services can only provide business logic through their APIs (whether they are REST-based or not), whereas Qworum services can also bring the UI that goes along with the business logic. This lightens the workload of Web application developers.

Then you may ask yourself: "But aren't OpenID Connect-based services also interactive?". Indeed they are, but OpenID Connect is only applicable to a particular problem domain, whereas Qworum's interactivity concept applies to all Web-based services.

How to enable Qworum for your website

In order to enable Qworum for your website, simply send us an email by using this link. Be sure to set the URL in the subject line to your own website URL. You can leave the email body empty, we will not read it.

If you don't enable Qworum for your website, you will get JavaScript run-time errors on your website if you try to use Qworum.

Enabling Qworum for your website is FREE and always will be.

Developer Resources

Work in progress.

• Qworum for Web Pages : With this JavaScript ES module, websites can use the advanced browser functionality that is provided by the Qworum browser extension.
• Demo : A Jamstack implementation of a Qworum application and two Qworum services. Shows how to use the Qworum for Web Pages library and how to have the Qworum browser extension installed on your users' browsers.
• Browser extension : Qworum applications must make sure that the user has installed and activated the Qworum extension. The demo linked above shows how this is done.

Deliverables

Work in progress.

• The Qworum Specification.
• Browser extension: Only Google Chrome is supported at this time, although adding support for all major browsers is on our roadmap.
• Client library in JavaScript: This library is intended for use in the Web pages of Qworum applications and services. See "How to enable Qworum for your website".
• Server library in JavaScript: Suitable for Node.js (and also Deno) applications. Used for sending dynamic Qworum scripts to clients, and for parsing phase parameters received from clients.
• Server library in TypeScript: Suitable for Deno applications. Used for sending dynamic Qworum scripts to clients, and for parsing phase parameters received from clients.
• Visual Studio Code extension: Provides XML snippets for writing static Qworum scripts. This VS Code extension is automatically activated for files that have the .qrm.xml extension.

Other planned deliverables:

• Chrome DevTools extension: For debugging Qworum applications and services.

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