One Line of Code That Changed the Web Forever
- 10.18.13
- 1:43 PM
Image: dalcrose/Flickr
What is the impact of HTML5 and HTML5 WebSocket on the Web?
The best way to understand this question is with a simple metaphor. Think of the current web as a walkie-talkie. You could probably still get by with a walkie-talkie if you needed to. After all, it’s been around for a while, and it works.
With the current Web, however, not only are we using a walkie-talkie, but it’s broken, only allowing us to initiate communication from one device or in the Web’s case, initiate-and-request information from the browser.
With a new Web communication standard, HTML5 WebSocket, entering the market, Web developers now have access to the equivalent of a cellphone — one channel for “talk” and “listen,” allowing us to send and receive information securely in any direction over the Web.
What would you choose if both push-to-talk and a cell phone were available to you? What would developers choose if both technologies were readily available to them?
If you’re still uncertain and feel like HTML5 WebSocket is an unproven standard then you might relate to this: remember the first time your friends started pushing you to buy a cellphone even though you already had a landline at home and one at the office that worked perfectly? Now several years later we can’t live without our cellphones.
With the HTML5 WebSocket standard the Web is about to take a fast, gigantic leap forward when it comes to Web communication, a leap that will take the established world of legacy Web solutions by surprise. We have already felt the beginnings of that change. The Web is moving into its next phase, morphing from a static and stale network to a live, interactive, and constantly changing mesh of communication—a living Web.
This new live Web will allow us to interact with our friends at levels we couldn’t have imagined five years ago, solve business problems that seemed impossible, continue to innovate using the Web as a foundation for new solutions benefiting humanity, accessing systems and share information at levels never seen before. The Web as we know it today was only the beginning, and now the Web will change everything.
To deliver on the new promise of a living Web we have to innovate and deliver solutions that are simpler, faster, and offer superior scalability. We enter a world of high performance Web communication, where time is everything and any delays, whether it is 100ms or 100μs, will cost companies millions of dollars in revenue.
In recent years new terms such as “The Internet of Things” and “Internet of Everything” have been used by industry giants such as Cisco, Ericsson, and IBM. These terms refer to this new shift in technology and lifestyle, a shift from a disconnected World to an always-connected and always-on World. It’s a world where every device from lifestyle apparel, utility meters, cars, appliances, to windows and doors are connected in ways we couldn’t imagine 10 years ago. Even if we try to look 10 years ahead, it is hard to fathom the profound impact this change will have on business and our daily life.
Now, this might seem like semantics for some of you as we use the terms interchangeably in daily life, but there is a substantial difference between the Internet and the Web. The Internet is used to connect machines at a low level and the Web is used to securely deliver information on top of the Internet.
By 2015, analysts are speculating that there will be 25 billion connected devices and by 2020, 50 billion devices (source Cisco, 2011). The market impact is forecast to be $1.1 trillion to $2.5 trillion annually (source McKinsey Global Institute, May ’13).
If we then look at what the mobile market is doing, more and more operators and carriers are moving to HTML5 based platforms for their handheld devices, such as Mozilla’s browser-based Firefox OS and Samsung’s HTML5-based system, Tizen. In addition to this, companies such as BMW and Audi are also moving to HTML5-based entertainment platforms.
With this explosive growth in connected devices, predominantly Web-enabled and Web-accessible devices (yes, I’m thinking about smartphones, tablets, vehicles, utility meters, apparel, and more) the demand for more live information, communication and distribution of data over the Web will grow exponentially. At this expected rate the growth of data distributed over the Web will outpace the performance principals of Moore’s Law, which we depend on to ensure that our hardware can keep up with our needs.
We are about to enter the third phase of the Web — a living Web, the Web of Things (WoT).
At Kaazing, we invented and pioneered the new Web communication standard — the HTLM5 WebSocket standard — that breaks down the boundaries of the traditional Web and drives us to reassess everything we ever knew about the Web. What we are also seeing is the convergence of a number of technologies that by virtue of the initial design of the Web have been able to craft a niche in the technology marketplace, such as load balancers, proxies, SSL termination, application servers, and Web cache.
Not only is the new standard improving bandwidth utilization, but it also gives us the ability to use any TCP-based high level communication format for our Web applications. This part of the HTML5 WebSocket standard has still yet to be fully appreciated. Right now most solutions and developers tinkering with the WebSocket APIs are looking at the new standard as merely a better replacement of XHR, or Ajax, when in fact it is a quantum leap forward in communicating over the Web that cannot be compared to XHR.
With WebSocket we can now build client libraries in any Web technology supporting any TCP-based protocol. A simple example would be to extend the now widely used chat protocol XMPP to the Web (a demo site lets you log in to Google Talk using XMPP over WebSocket) by providing a client-side implementation on top of WebSocket APIs.
Similarly, MQTT is another protocol ideal for lightweight messages in constricted environments. With WebSocket, MQTT can be extended to the web to monitor or collect data using devices with limited processing capabilities such as running on battery power or with low memory capacity. In cases where reliability, security, and enterprise scalability are critical, the ideal protocol would be to extend Java Message Service (JMS) over WebSocket such as the Kaazing WebSocket Gateway.
We see industries such as banking, transportation, travel, logistics, healthcare, and emergency
services requiring this type of implementation in order to rapidly execute delivery of their mission-critical, guaranteed, larger-sized business messages out to all their web-connected devices and customers.
Kaazing’s new technology, built with HTML5 WebSocket as a foundation, is rapidly evolving into a revolutionary Web communication platform. It will change how companies view their online presence and identity, their business opportunities and problems, and how to architect and deploy solutions to support the future of their Web infrastructure and the explosive growth of mobile devices.
The communication platform is designed from the ground up to address the requirements of the Web of Things, or what some call the Internet of Things.
One of the key things to remember when planning the launch of your future Web application is who will be accessing this application and with what type of client. Over the past two years mobile platforms such as the iPad and iPhone have taken over as the leaders in accessing Web content. The expected growth in users connecting to the Web over the next four years is staggering, with numbers in the tens of billions.
If we then take into consideration that the Web infrastructures are all based on ancient technologies and architecture designs, then we are clearly heading for a disaster. These legacy systems were never designed for the performance and scalability demands required by the new generation applications that are accessed at anytime and anywhere, from any device.
Traditional Web solutions are simply not powerful enough for our brave new world of live and real-time Web communication. It’s a simple matter of physics and computer science — the traditional HTTP Web technologies of the last 18 years won’t take us through the next 10 years. The demands are different, the scales are different, the expectations are different, the depth and range of what users expect are profoundly different, and the stakes are certainly different.
Rather than using technology to reconcile what has already happened, the new breed of IT systems must be able to see, evaluate, analyze, and make expert recommendations based on what is yet to be — and they must do so in real time.
So where does this lead us and how can we move forward? The simplest design ideas are often the innovations with the most impact. WebSocket as an idea and design is “simple” and its impact on our industry will be profound. Of course, with simple ideas you also get the “doubters.” I remember a time when my co-founder John Fallows and I met with a renowned VC in Silicon Valley and he asked us:
“If this is such a great idea why has no one come up with this idea before?”
I guess you could ask humanity a similar question about why it took hundreds of thousands of years to invent the wheel — after all it’s so obvious and simple. What is important to understand is that with this new standard we have at our disposal a very powerful tool that will enable us to communicate securely with anything over the Web. Only our own imagination will limit our ability to fully exploit the WebSocket standard to its full potential and serve the Web of Things.
Jonas Jacobi is co-founder and CEO of the live web and mobile communications company Kaazing.
