Front-End Web Development: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

16 Real-Time Communication with WebSockets

With regular GET and POST requests, your browser has to make a new request and wait for a response for each exchange of data with the server. As you learned in earlier chapters, this is also the case with Ajax requests. While Ajax requests do not cause page reloads, they do generate just as much network traffic, with each request and response requiring a little bit of overhead to produce and process.

WebSockets, on the other hand, provides a two-way communication protocol over HTTP. It creates a single connection and keeps it open for real-time communication (Figure 16.1).

Figure 16.1  Multiple Ajax requests vs a single WebSockets connection

With WebSockets, web applications ...