Re: [hybi] Fwd: Web sockets and existing HTTP stacks

[Jamie Lokier <[e-mail]>]

Christian Biesinger wrote:
> [resent from [e-mail], with slight additions here]
> 
> Hi,
> 
> so I was reading the web sockets spec as well as a Firefox patch to
> implement it.
> 
> Is it intentional that it is impossible to implement this spec over an
> existing HTTP stack, as currently specified? In particular, due to the
> strict requirements on the headers to send, it seems like you can't
> really implement it with an existing HTTP stack.
> On the other hand, you really do want to reuse your HTTP
> implementation, because otherwise you have to reimplement all your
> HTTP proxy authentication, including NTLM, GSSAPI, etc. Obviously
> another problem would be that the actual bidirectional communication
> might be hard to fit into your HTTP implementation, but that might
> be easier to work around.

This has been the cause of quite some discussion on this list.

The main spec editor believes WebSocket should intentionally fail when
encountering a proxy etc. and the web application should fall back to
some other method in that case, or simply not support those cases.

Needless to say, several people take the opposite view, that it should
work over general HTTP infrastructure, but as that would make the
protocol more complicated and simplicity is also a goal, there is no
consensus.

Originally WebSocket was just a wrapper around raw TCP sockets, like
you have in Flash and Java, which is where it gets this from.

-- Jamie