Proposed QIIME2 Roadmap

Gotcha, no particular details are set in stone at this point (and they don't need to be yet). From a strictly hypothetical perspective, a WebSocket based protocol would actually make things a bit easier from the web GUI side, as it could just open a persistent connection from which the server could push updates to. (as opposed to the GUI continuously polling the server). This is also how IPython operates at the moment.