The WebSocket protocol - Draft, HyBi 09

Due to client demand we’re working on the WebSocket protocol again. Things have moved on since the work we did in December and this time the resulting option pack really will make it into the next release rather than simply being something that we tweak for each client that asks for it.

Back in December one of our gaming clients wanted WebSocket functionality in their game server so we did some work on the two versions of the spec that they wanted, the Hixie 76 draft and the HyBi 03 draft. The protocol has since gone through some changes and is now looking to be stabilising once again with the HyBi 09 draft.

The new version of the protocol still has a few outstanding questions though, such as whether the existing design of the deflate-stream extension is actually worth having in the presence of frame data masking, see here… So we expect that there will be several more revisions of our implementation as the standard solidifies and our client’s usage patterns emerge.