Re: [hybi] The future of WebSockets, and the WiSH proposal

Loïc Hoguin <essen@ninenines.eu> Tue, 25 April 2017 09:58 UTC

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To: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@annevk.nl>
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From: Loïc Hoguin <essen@ninenines.eu>
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Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2017 11:58:42 +0200
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Subject: Re: [hybi] The future of WebSockets, and the WiSH proposal
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Hello,

On 04/25/2017 11:10 AM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 11:01 AM, Andy Green <andy@warmcat.com> wrote:
>> Can someone point the rump of hybi-subscribers who have no idea what you are
>> talking about with this "fetch() / Streams" stuff to some definitive
>> documentation?
>
> Apologies, fetch() is basically what replaces XMLHttpRequest and it
> has slowly evolved to expose streams which in theory allows for
> full-duplex communication even over H/1:
>
>   https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org/
>   https://streams.spec.whatwg.org/
>
> It's still early days implementation-wise though with regards to the
> streams integration.

While this looks interesting, it doesn't help any of us with 
non-browser/non-JS clients, like server-side clients or mobile applications.

Here are a few things my users would like to be able to do:

* Make their custom Websocket code work over HTTP/2 or any future 
protocol (QUIC or other)

* Continue using the Websocket sub-protocol feature without having to 
dedicate an entire connection for it (layering an existing protocol over 
HTTP has advantages for authentication and routing)

* Have a good media type for the streaming of binary events

A common pattern my users have when contacting a server is to first 
request a resource that will stream events, then perform other requests 
separately.

Here are the issues commonly encountered right now. I'm assuming here 
that clients can use HTTP/2:

* Having to open 2 connections (not the best idea for mobile clients, 
and uses twice the memory on the server side)

* Having to reimplement a custom HTTP/2-like protocol on top of 
Websocket to avoid having those 2 connections (works, but non-standard, 
and prone to errors)

* Having to use text/event-stream with base64-encoded binary data 
(inefficient, especially for larger events)

* For users who would otherwise be fine with text-based events: having 
to use text encodings. JSON in particular is very inefficient and puts a 
heavy strain on the server, switching from JSON to msgpack for example 
makes my servers load go back to 0 even with tens of thousands of 
connections. Even if using something other than JSON, there's still the 
matter of decoding text/event-stream.

* Having to implement a custom multipart media type for events, for 
those who go that route. Few do because it's non-standard.

My users tend to have servers with 10K+ or sometimes 100K+ connections, 
so we have slightly different needs than most people, but they're still 
worth considering when defining standards I think.

On top of that WiSH is easier to integrate on the server because it fits 
better with the HTTP semantics (using content negotiation, in 
particular). It would be possible to have common code for 
text/event-stream and WiSH should one desire to, while Websocket itself 
makes that less practical.

I don't really know how the standards process works but I would be 
really interesting to see WiSH make it in one form or another even if 
browsers are not willing to implement it, because it would definitely 
benefit the rest of us.

Cheers,

-- 
Loïc Hoguin
https://ninenines.eu