SVG 2D Graphics Research
Booking Systems Architecture

Booking Systems

SVG is brilliantly suited to booking systems. Compact file format gives it fast economical picture download. Fast server App execution means that the server-side application can draw on server data to reflect the current booking situation. Hence the graphics a) show what is already booked, and b) disable already-booked entities from being mouse-clicked.

1. Server-side Graphics Apps produce SVG from data. PenDraw is an ideal language for that. In this system you might just let the user access the SVG directly as a web page, or you can put it into XHTML (or HTML etc).
2. Client-side javascript/vbscript enables user interaction with the graphics, and builds up a character string that a) summarises changes that the user makes to the picture, and b) is stored in an HTML form text field, or in an SVG anchor if the user is viewing SVG directly.
3. The HTML form Submit Button, or the SVG anchor, invokes a server-side script that completes the transaction, from the character string that defines user choices.

SVG can show different shapes and layouts: building plans are very easy, and it can draw curves for ships too. So the graphics are not restricted to rectangular layouts.

SVG provides interaction through the mouse, and the picture can change dynamically, client-side, to reflect customer choices. This extends your booking systems architecture, in a naturally interactive way.

Remember that any part of the SVG graphics picture can act as a hyper link, so you can construct documents that have rich semantic structures, and offer the user natural and helpful interfaces. That provides extensibility across to other parts of the same document or to a whole other document set, to give you an even more powerful booking systems architecture.

Browser Zoom and Pan enable the customer to look at detail, before choosing the seat/room/cabin they want.