WebSockets

Soldato
Joined
21 Oct 2002
Posts
18,022
Location
London & Singapore
Anyone else getting excited by this new standard that allows TCP tunnelling over HTTP?

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-hybi-thewebsocketprotocol-17

It's natively supported by Windows 8 and .NET 4.5. It appears that Microsoft will be heavily promoting it for use in developing Metro apps. But it's applications for web apps is just as great, I can imagine Google and Facebook will be redesigning their entire systems around WebSockets in the near future.

I've no idea why it is frequently pushed as feature of HTML5. It has nothing to do with HTML markup. It is a protocol extension for HTTP 1.1. Oh, and a minor Client API specification for JavaScript engines.

Unfortunately I think it is going to kill off or at least fairly extremely stunt the growth of the REST web services movement. But maybe that's for the best, because it's been 5 years and still nobody has came along with a really decent REST framework. Maybe WCF Web API... but that's still not production ready. Just when you think RPC has been killed off, WebSockets comes along to revive it :p
 
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