WebSockets RFC is now official • Hacker News Board

Re: WebSockets RFC is now official

#41

Post by maximusprime » Mon, Dec 12, 2011, 12:24 PM UTC

koen wrote: post #37

metabrew wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, they undid the crazy 8 bytes of body that wasn't declared by content-length, back in hixie-76. The current protocols play nicely with HTTP aware proxies now. They introduced plenty of other crazy things.. but at least it works with proxies.

I'm not to happy with this change though. At least with hixie-76, connections would fail to connect if the intermediate proxies are not understanding WebSockets. Now, your connection will succeed, both client and server will believe they can successfully communicate, but communication will not work and die a slow timeout. Not very reliable, is it ?

  * try websocket
  * on failure, fallback to comet

It's fairly easy to implement.

Re: WebSockets RFC is now official

#42

Post by malone » Mon, Dec 12, 2011, 12:45 PM UTC

brooksbp wrote: post #14

drewblaisdell wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite literally. One of the most obvious applications of this is creating asynchronous multiplayer browser games.

Oh boy. Pretty soon we will need UDP sockets in the browser.

I don't understand why they didn't just provide an api to normal IP layer sockets, it would have given a lot more flexibility. I'm thinking the sort of lower level networking access you get in node.js

If people really wanted to send data over this weird semi-HTTP websocket protocol then someone could have implemented it as a js library on top of proper socket calls.

I'm guessing the main issue was cross-domain security, but I would have liked to see this solved using some sort of policy file that can be requested from the domain before connecting, like Flash does.

Re: WebSockets RFC is now official

#43

Post by jweant » Mon, Dec 12, 2011, 2:43 PM UTC

I had no idea this was in the works (not been reading ietf lately). Wonderful post.

Re: WebSockets RFC is now official

#44

Post by draegtun » Mon, Dec 12, 2011, 2:54 PM UTC

perlgeek wrote: post #40

Mojolicious, a modern Perl web framework, has great support for WebSockets. Check out http://mojolicio.us/

You probably couldn't see my earlier Perl comment in all the jetsam & flotsam here :)

ref: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3342952

Re: WebSockets RFC is now official

#45

Post by taylorbuley » Mon, Dec 12, 2011, 3:26 PM UTC

pingswept wrote: post #7

Websockets browser support: http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets

Love caniuse.com but unfortunately there's lot missing from this support matrix.

More important than which browsers support the API is which underlying protocol version the sockets speak. A lot of major browsers support the API but very few speak the same protocol.

I believe today's announcement is a finalized protocol standard which means that there's finally going to be a lingua franca for websockets.

Re: WebSockets RFC is now official

#46

Post by wmf » Mon, Dec 12, 2011, 5:26 PM UTC

zurn wrote: post #38

ITYM "WebSockets is now officially IETF Proposed Standard" or something like that. Publication as an RFC doesn't signify any status of the protocol standards-wise, almost any protocol can be documented in an informational, experimental or historical RFC.

But RFCs don't change every month, which is the real milestone being celebrated here.

Re: WebSockets RFC is now official

#47

Post by aidenn0 » Mon, Dec 12, 2011, 5:38 PM UTC

curiouskat wrote: post #20

What's the best option for using websockets with Python? WSGI doesn't support it ( http://librelist.com/browser//flask/2010/9/1/flask-and-webso... ). gevent is an option ( http://blog.pythonisito.com/2011/07/gevent-zeromq-websockets... ), but would something like Mongrel2 be better ( http://mongrel2.org/ )? UPDATE: There's also Juggernaut ( http://flask.pocoo.org/snippets/80/ ), which uses node.js under the hood.

I wrote the websockets implementation for mongrel2, and just as an FYI, it only supports the more recent websockets standard (they made some incompatible changes around draft version 7). The good news is that the only browser that ever had the old version on by default was chrome (firefox and opera defaulted it off for security reasons), so there aren't too many browsers out in the wild using the old version.