Book Image

Heroku Cloud Application Development

By : Anubhav Hanjura
Book Image

Heroku Cloud Application Development

By: Anubhav Hanjura

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Heroku Cloud Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introducing Websockets


The Websocket (WS) protocol is a new protocol that supports a bidirectional channel for communication between a server and a client. This protocol overcomes several serious shortcomings of the earlier HTTP communication method. It includes a full duplex, bidirectional communication channel between a server and client over TCP. The RFC 6455 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455) provides a detailed specification of this protocol. The Websocket protocol was standardized about two years ago by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and since then has found several uses in real-time web apps (games, real-time chat, and more).

Websocket versus HTTP

The Websocket protocol also has some distinct advantages over HTTP, especially when it comes to bidirectional notifications between the server and the client. Once the Websocket connection is established between the client and host server, data can flow in both directions simultaneously over TCP. This circumvents the communication...