Re: [hybi] WebSockets

[Peter Saint-Andre <[e-mail]>]

On 3/30/09 7:43 PM, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> On Mar 30, 2009, at 2:34 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> 
>> The goal of the WebSocket work is to provide two-way communication from a
>> Web page in a clean way.
> 
> It would be nice to have a list of use cases for why anyone would want
> a Web page (as opposed to an installed client or client extension) to
> provide two-way communication, and also why that two-way communication
> must be tunneled over the Web ports in a way that deliberately intends
> to fool security-enforcing intermediaries into thinking it is HTTP.

I can't speak for the WebSocket work, but I know that in XMPP we use
BOSH <http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0124.html> as a way of emulating
long-lived TCP connections over HTTP. We do this to build browser-based
clients (a "no-download" solution) and to support devices that cannot
maintain long-lived TCP connections (either because of device
restrictions or network conditions). BOSH traffic is not necessarily
tunneled over ports 80 and 443, and the purpose is not to work around
firewalls but to offer an alternative binding for XMPP traffic when the
TCP binding defined in RFC 3920 is simply not feasible.

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/