2014-10-07 4:59 GMT-03:00 Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu>:
Hi Alain,
Any network protocol between two processes has overhead, even the one you would write yourself. It does make sense to use something that already exists, uses open standards and is used and battle tested by others.
There is a fundamental difference between HTTP and WebSockets: HTTP is request/response where the initiative lies with the client, WebSockets is fully bidirectional once the connection is setup. There is also less overhead with WebSockets. In both cases you should take care to do your data conversions on/off the wire as efficient as possible.
I would say: go for it.
+1 for each of the paragraphs. Plus in the not so far future HTTP2 [1] might be promoted to a standard, meanwhile SPDY [2] is already usable and deployed, so the connection cost and the protocol transport might become cheaper along faster underlying communication channels. Best regards! [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-14 [2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-mbelshe-httpbis-spdy-00