
Introducing WebSockets: Bringing Sockets to the Web (2010) - tambourine_man
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/websockets/basics/
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niftich
Append to title: (2010)

Oh, Websockets! Never has a technology so unambiguously demonstrated that we
abused the web to become a new desktop where we run (mostly) cross-platform
pieces of minified blackbox JS and need the same types of abstractions like
you'd find in a real OS, like, say, sockets.

That being said, it was better than imperfect emulations of the same concept
that pre-dated it by ~6+ years (like long polling). I'd even go so far as to
say that the rise of websockets and the excitement over streaming real-time
data between webapps greatly contributed to the traction of Node.js, which was
the runtime for socket.io.

Socket.io offered one consistent API that just worked, and internally it
wrapped websocket or its workarounds, depending on where the code ran. It was
beautiful. I remember many tutorials about Node.js starting off with
socket.io.

Now, with HTTP2, Websocket is sort-of abandoned -- not because HTTP2 is that
good, but no one is excited about WS anymore. But once QUIC becomes mainstream
and HTTP2's imperfect attempt to reinvent a transport protocol over an
existing transport protocol is subsumed into HTTP2-over-QUIC, there will be
zero need for WS.

~~~
lioeters
It's true that WebSockets is nothing new, and the title did make it sound like
the next new shiny thing. I wouldn't say that it's abandoned though - its
adoption is still spreading from where I see, and it's very useful during
build/development too, i.e., live-reload on code change.

"..that we abused the web to become a new desktop"

Yesterday's hacks become tomorrow's standards..!

