An Introduction to WebSockets
In this blog post we’re going to cover how to use WebSockets to create real-time web applications. Before we dive into learning about the WebSocket protocol and API I first want to spend a little time going through some of problems that face real-time web applications and how the WebSocket spec aims to solve them. A Brief History of Real-Time Web Applications The web was built around the idea that a client’s job is to request data from a server, and a server’s job is to fulfill those requests. This paradigm went unchallenged for a number of years but with the introduction of AJAX around 2005 many people started to explore the possibilities of making connections between a client and server bidirectional . Web applications had grown up a lot and were now consuming more data than ever before. The biggest thing holding them back was the traditional HTTP model of client initiated transactions. To overcome this a number of different strategies were devised to allow servers to