WebSockets RFC is now official

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-announce/current/msg09663.html

by Qwl • 15 years ago

315 45 15 years ago

ietf.org

dicroce• 15 years ago

Let the games begin!

drewblaisdell• 15 years ago

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

brooksbp• 15 years ago

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

perezd• 15 years ago

Now CouchDB's _changes can support websockets!

aaronblohowiak• 15 years ago

Yay! Looks like they fixed it. Now, it looks like it is a normal upgrade request so proxies, et al, should play nice. Yaaay!

metabrew• 15 years ago

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.

koen• 15 years ago

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 ?

paulbatum• 15 years ago

Many proxies deployed today won't understand the upgrade header and in the case of an explicit proxy config will ignore the CONNECT operation if performed on 80 (rather than 443).

WebSockets works best over SSL.

lkrubner• 15 years ago

I look forward to pushing this to the absolute limit. Chat? Can we do something cool with voice? What about websites-as-desktop-software that started when Ajax got cool, but paused when developers ran into the limits of Ajax? How far can that now go? GPS services?

_pdeschen• 15 years ago

gps service? checked!

Well kind of. Last summer I did a road trip to newfoundland (canada) with a laptop, a gps and a webcam onboard [1]. The idea was to have people (friends and family) to follow our trip through a website to which I pushed webcam frames and gps coordinate in real time using websocket (socket.io) over my smarthphone. It was fun!

[1] http://blog.rassemblr.com/2011/07/how-to-hack-a-road-trip-wi...

notatoad• 15 years ago

You'll probably want to wait until webrtc to do cool things with voice.

pingswept• 15 years ago

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

sjs• 15 years ago

I let socket.io worry about that. Great library.

nkassis• 15 years ago

I agree about socket.io. It works quiet well for most of what I need. The only issue I have with is is I can't figure out if it now supports sending and receiving ArrayBuffers? Does anyone know anything about this?

My use case involves sending model data to display in WebGL. Sending it any other way would be inefficient.

jmspring• 15 years ago

socket.io is a great library, agreed. However, a nice thing about standards is you can program to the specification and provide support on other platforms. Working on a project that involves node, a browser client, and a couple of mobile platforms -- socket.io is great for the server->browser websocket or comet case, but for the mobile case investigating the proper library (or hand rolling a compatible WS/comet implementation) is needed.

The step towards standardization will make this type of cross "platform" compatibility easier in the long run.

taylorbuley• 15 years ago

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.

akg• 15 years ago

Awesome! Should be interesting to see a slew of new collaborative tools and games coming out soon!

d0mine• 15 years ago

link to html version: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455

instead of the plain-text one: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6455.txt

DarrenLehane• 15 years ago

Incredible news. This day couldn't come soon enough.

curiouskat• 15 years ago

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.

twism• 15 years ago

I have had a lot of success with Tornado ... http://www.tornadoweb.org/documentation/websocket.html

stuartk• 15 years ago

+1 for tornado. And I also use Tornadio, which implements the backend for Socket.io.

zaphoyd• 15 years ago

https://github.com/oberstet/Autobahn is another option

theturtle32• 15 years ago

AutoBahn is an absolutely top notch implementation of WebSockets for twisted. It's probably one of the most complete and robust implementations on any platform, and their test suite is currently the gold standard against which other implementors test their own implementations.

hackforlife• 15 years ago

https://github.com/MostAwesomeDude/txWS

Twisted gives you the foundation for pretty amazing things to start with, and txWS does a good job of adding WebSockets.

cft• 15 years ago

txWS is the best twisted-based framework for websocket: it does not assume that you want to combine it with a web server, and allows you to wrap your existing protocols into websocket

DanWaterworth• 15 years ago

If you're interested in a easy-to-use hosted solution, you could try Pusher ( http://pusher.com ). It would be the fastest way to get up and running and you wouldn't have to worry about the details.

Disclaimer: I work for Pusher.

ecdavis• 15 years ago

Check out Pants!

http://pantsweb.org/

denik• 15 years ago

We've just released a bunch of updates for gevent-websocket: https://bitbucket.org/denis/gevent-websocket

We use it successfully at SiteSupport (http://sitesupport.com)

aidenn0• 15 years ago

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.

draegtun2• 15 years ago

For Perl mongers interested in WebSockets then take a look at...

* Mojolicious web framework which managed to keep up with the constantly moving standard! - http://mojolicio.us/

* PocketIO which is a Perl implementation of SocketIO - https://github.com/vti/pocketio

* Protocol::WebSocket module which adds WebSockets to the PSGI (Plack) stack - https://metacpan.org/module/Protocol::WebSocket

zurn• 15 years ago

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.

wmf• 15 years ago

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

easy_rider• 15 years ago

Note to self: don't start reading RFC's when you're supposed to go to bed to get up for work in time the next morning.

perlgeek• 15 years ago

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

draegtun2• 15 years ago

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

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

jweant• 15 years ago

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

WebSockets RFC is now official

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