Adding server-side communication to your web pages to enable features such as multiuser interactivity or push notifications is becoming more and more popular with the advent of WebSockets. To put it in a nutshell, WebSockets fill the void when you need a server to communicate with the client without requiring the client's request.
When building Flash applications, typically one would use technologies and frameworks such as Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) or SmartFoxServer (http://www.smartfoxserver.com) to allow for server-based multiuser applications. This concept is now available with the use of WebSockets and is a true testament to how far the development of the HTML specification has come.
In the upcoming chapters, we will continue to look into more thorough examples of WebSockets in action, as well as some other interesting methods for connecting users viewing your HTML5 content, such as Socket.io (http://socket.io), Node.js (http://nodejs.org), and Google V8 (http:...