The use of HTTP, URL and REST communications is well understood for request/response interactions. The use of continuously connected, streaming interactions over the web is less well understood.
The ZiNC protocol is designed to eliminate much of the confusion and uncertainty surrounding streaming interactions.
The ZiNC protocol is a simple, well-defined protocol that builds on top of other standard protocols, but leaves the definition of operational semantics up to the applications.
Building on top of WebSockets, the ZiNC protocol is compatible with most modern web servers and browsers.
ZiNC uses JSON as its transport because it is easily and natively understood by all browsers; but this does not require servers or applications to use JavaScript. It is simply an encoding format.
ZiNC uses JSON to encode requests, but stays in the spirit of HTTP requests and URIs.
ZiNC builds on top of JSONAPI to define its object payloads.
Simple APIs to use to communicate using the ZiNC protocol are available for: