JavaScript Web Applications

Chapter 8. The Real-Time Web

Why is the real-time Web so important? We live in a real-time world, so it’s only natural that the Web is moving in that direction. Users clamor for real-time communication, data, and search. Our expectations for how quickly the Internet should deliver us information have changed—delays of minutes in breaking news stories are now unacceptable. Major companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter have been quick to catch onto this, offering real-time functionality in their services. This is a growing trend that’s only going to get bigger.

Real Time’s History

Traditionally, the Web was built around the request/response model of HTTP: a client requests a web page, the server delivers it, and nothing happens again until the client requests another page. Then, Ajax came along and made web pages feel a bit more dynamic—requests to the server could now be made in the background. However, if the server had additional data for clients, there was no way of notifying them after the page was loaded; live data couldn’t be pushed to clients.

Lots of solutions were devised. The most basic was polling: just asking the server over and over again for any new information. This gave users the perception of real time. In practice, it introduced latency and performance problems because servers had to process a huge number of connections a second, with both TCP handshake and HTTP overheads. Although polling is still used, it’s by no means ideal.

Then, more advanced ...