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WebSocket Support Investigation

With Comet technology dying out and HTML5 around the corner, WebSocket support is  becoming a very hot topic on the edge of the new Push Button Web revolution.

I set out to discover how viable that technology is right now.

Client Side

HTML5 Compliant Technologies

HTML5 compliance includes a WebSocket object that can be used to make persistent streaming tcp connections to a WebSocket server (cross-domain).

The only browsers currently supporting this technology is Google Chrome and Safari. (Webkit implementors). Firefox is planning on including WebSocket support in their 3.7 release. IE is quiet on the matter (we're used to this by now).

I have tested HTML5 WebSocket implementation using Chrome as client and PHP for the WebSocket server. It was blazingly fast, reliable and robust when I intentionally disrupted network availability.

WebSocket using Flash

For browsers not offering native WebSocket support, the standard workaround is to use Flash socket connections. I implemented a few of these methods, and even though I eventually got it to work, I found it not very robust (when it broke, I had to refresh the page to get the connection back up and running) and definitely not very friendly (Flash TCP connections require a security policy file to be rendered from the same server on port 843 before the socket connection is allowed)

This is an awkward solution, and feels mostly like a hack. It is also dependent on client-side variables like whether Flash is supported on the client and what version is running.

Server Side

The server side implementation of WebSocket is well supported. Most server side programming languages provide an implementation of CURL, which is quite enough to support WebSockets.

The main challenges on this end is configuring your hosting platform to open the chosen port for traffic.