Building desktop applications with Web services in a message-based MVC paradigm

Over the past decade, classic client side applications with model-view-controller (MVC) architecture haven't changed much but become more complex. In this paper, we present an approach of building desktop applications with Web Services in an explicit message-based MVC paradigm. By integrating with our publish/subscribe messaging middleware, it makes SVG browser (a Microsoft PowerPoint like client application) with Web service style interfaces universally accessible from different client platforms - Windows, Linux, MacOS, PalmOS and other customized ones. Performance data suggests that this scheme of building application around messages is a practical architecture for the next generation Web application client.