webtransport VS rupy

WebTransport is now enabled by default and will be going to release with 114. As the original Explainer notes, it enables multiple use-cases that are hard or impossible to handle without it, especially for Gaming and live streaming. It covers cases that are problematic for alternative mechanisms, such as WebSockets. Built on top of HTTP3 (HTTP2 support will be coming later). The current implementation in Firefox is passing 505 out of 565 Web-Platform Tests.

WebTransport is still an emerging technology. As of November 2022, WebTransport is a draft specification with W3C, and there’s always a chance that aspects related to how it works may change.

Sort of. The browser will re-use the connection if you have a bunch of resources in the HTML. When rendering it sees that it needs 2 images and 3 javascript files from the same server, so it pipelines all of those. But for requests initiated from javascript, you're going to get a new connection for each one unless you're using a library that implements the long-polling hack. SocketIO can use the long-polling hack as a fallback if websockets is not supported. HTTP/2 (formerly SPDY) gets part of the way to replacing websockets, but it's not a synchronous link. Only the client can send messages to the server and the server can only respond to those message (with websockets, either side can send messages once the connection is open). FWIW, less than 50% of websites use HTTP/2. HTTP/3's webtransport looks like it could replace websockets, but it also looks like it'll live along side websockets.

If it's streaming data like dashboard statistics the new WebTransport API might be a much better base: https://github.com/w3c/webtransport/blob/main/explainer.md

Are you guys looking into the Web Transport protocol for the future? Right now you have to tunnel the websocket connections over http2 and it will probably be the same for http3 afaik.

I know there is this work in progress (https://w3c.github.io/webtransport/) and websockets are probably fine for a long time but sooner or later (unless there is an update to websockets) it will probably be faster to just do normal http requests and listen on server sent events.

What are your thoughts for Liveview for the future? Will it forever stay on websockets or would you be open to change the underlying technology if / when new stuff becomes available?

The W3C draft is here: https://github.com/w3c/webtransport

It's taken nearly 10 years for QUIC to be refined and adopted in the wild and we're basically there. There's even a new browser API in the works called WebTransport.

tl;dr using WebRTC just for realtime client<->server data sucks, but WebTransport[1] is coming soon to serve that exact usecase with an easy API

WebRTC has data channels, which are currently the only way to achieve unreliable and unordered real-time communication (UDP-style) between the browser and other browsers or a server. This is pretty essential for any networked application where latency is critical, like voice and video and fast-paced multiplayer games.

As other commenters have noted, it's a royal pain in the ass to set up WebRTC if all you want is UDP-style communication between a server and browser, since you need to wrangle half a dozen other protocols in the process.

However! A new API, WebTransport[1], is actively being developed that will offer a WebSockets-like (read: super simple to set up) API for UDP-style communication. I am extremely excited about it and its potential for real-time browser-based multiplayer games (which I'm working on).

https://github.com/w3c/webtransport

I have been running a Raspberry 2 cluster for 10 years: http://host.rupy.se

A few weeks back the first SD card to fail got so corrupted it failed to reboot!

My key learning is use oversized cards, because then the bitcycle will wear slower!

I'm going from 32GB to 256/512/1024!

How this article does not mention SSE, comet or chunking escapes me.

What does their definition of event-driven really look like in practice.

Nobody has a clue.

Here is the ideal event driven system, it's async-to-async: https://github.com/tinspin/rupy/wiki/Fuse

The example is not working because I had to shut down the services for multiple reasons, but the high level of it is that you use 4 (potentially different) threads to do one request/response middle man transaction.

That way you have _zero_ io-wait or idling. I'm surprised nobody has copied this approach since I invented it 10 years ago. I understand why though you need your entire chain to be async and that means rewriting everything and that is a big risk when it's hard to debug.

But if you succeed you can build something that is 10x perf/watt than all other implementations. Which is going to be important when interest rates go higher and crash our entire industry.

The hardware is peaking.

So software is where you can make the difference: http://host.rupy.se

I think we're all confused over the definition. Also one might understand what all the proponents are talking about better if they think about this more as a process and not some technological solution:

https://github.com/tinspin/rupy/wiki/Process

All input I have is you want your code to run on many machines, in fact you want it to run the same on all machines you need to deliver and preferably more. Vertically and horizontally at the same time, so your services only call localhost but in many separate places.

This in turn mandates a distributed database. And later you discover it has to be capable of async-to-async = no blocking ever anywhere in the whole solution.

The way I do this is I hot-deploy my applications async. to all servers in the cluster, this is what a cluster node looks like in practice (the name next to Host: is the node): http://host.rupy.se if you click "api & metrics" you'll see the services.

With this not only do you get scalability, but also redundancy and development is maintained at live coding levels.

I have hosted my own web server both physically and codevise since 2014.

It's on a Raspberry 2 cluster:

http://host.rupy.se

Since 2016 i have my own database also coded from scratch:

http://root.rupy.se

We need to implement HTTP/1.1 with less bloat, a C non-blocking web server that can share memory between threads is probably the most interesting project for humans right now, is anyone working on that?

I have one in Java: https://github.com/tinspin/rupy

Here is the 2000 lines of code of the entire database: http://root.rupy.se/code?path=/Root.java

And here you can try it out: http://root.rupy.se

The smallest PaaS you have ever seen is one order of magnitude larger than mine: https://github.com/tinspin/rupy

And I bet you the same goes for performance, if not two!

The data is here: http://fuse.rupy.se/about.html

Under Performance. Per watt the fuse/rupy platform completely crushes all competition because of 2 reasons:

- Event driven protocol design, averages at about 4 messages/player/second (means you cannot do spraying or headshots f.ex. which is another feature in my game design opinion).

- Java's memory model with atomic concurrency which needs a VM and GC (C++ copied that memory model in C++11, but it failed completely because they lack both VM and GC, but that model is still to this day the one C++ uses), you can read more about this here: https://github.com/tinspin/rupy/wiki

You can argue those points are bad arguments, but if you look at performance per watt with some consideration for developer friendlyness, I'm pretty sure in 100 years we will still be coding minimalist JavaSE on the server and vanilla C (compiled with C++ compiler) on the client.