Re: [hybi] Is there a traffic jam?

["Sylvain Hellegouarch" <[e-mail]>]

> Mike Dierken wrote:
>> I was thinking the applet would expose the 'web socket' API (or
>> equivalent) and the app would be built with JavaScript. This would be
>> a way to prototype an approach that created a sibling of
>> XMLHttpRequest, but meant for receiving unsolicited requests in a page
>> - something like XMLHttpServer (but without the XML part).
>
>
> Having access to TCP does not really help much.
>
> You still will not be able to tunnel through many firewalls
> and proxies without pretending to be HTTP.

But that's exactly the point, isn't it? Instead of reinventing the wheel
to go through firewalls and proxies, you reuse what's been defined,
refined and tested over decades of networking.

Corporations will always want at some point to control their traffic, they
have already administrators that know how to handle the basic TCP routing.
Here we are trying to defeat that but ultimately software will be upgraded
to filter WS anyway if required. You just add a layer of complexity to the
game. I fail to understand the value in that. Why not educating players in
the game to play fair? Port 80 is spoiled more and more and that means
it's more and more complex to perform proper security without basically
shutting down almost anything going through.

>
> Also as a client/application API, raw TCP is pretty
> difficult to code against.   What does an application do
> with 2 bytes of a 6-byte UTF-8 character.

It doesn't seem to have blocked the software industry so far. Libraries
handle those issues and offer higher level of abstraction for any given
protocol. JavaScript is short in those so far precisely due to the
constraints of not having access to raw TCP sockets I believe.

Why is the browser so different from anything else?

>
> I very much like websockets abstraction of utf-8 datagrams
> in the js/dom API.   This is very usable by applications
> and/or frameworks (I just don't think the transport should
> be skewed to support uncompressed UTF-8 datagrams without meta
> data.)

>From my perspective it's just one more layer of complexity.

- Sylvain
-- 
Sylvain Hellegouarch
http://www.defuze.org