New Possibilities

Most of the buzz surrounding the impending implementation of HTML 5.0 has centered on the effort to describe a common video codec. And that is big news. But it's not why we're chomping at the bit.

It's WebSocket that has us excited.

A Quick Story

We've been thinking about the lack of native browser support for socket connections for some time. A couple years ago, a client came to us with a problem. They wanted to replace the desktop application used by their customer service agents with a web application, but they didn't know how they could communicate with their telephony switch without a persistent, two-way connection.

In a controlled environment like this, the solution is fairly straight-forward. First, you implement a scalable socket server between the telephone switch and the agents. The server establishes all the connections and governs all the messaging between the two endpoints. Then, because browsers don't support socket connections natively, you write a Flash object that implements a socket API and embed it in your web application. Finally, you write enough JavaScript to create the socket connection via the Flash object, listen for incoming messages, and send outgoing messages.

But what if it weren't a controlled environment? Not all users on the web have the Flash plugin installed for their browser, and even the ones that do have different versions installed. And, wait a minute. How exactly is the work described in the preceding paragraph straight-forward?

Our Idea

Someone needs to make a generic, extensible application server designed around socket protocols.

HTML 5.0 is going to simplify connections on the client side, but how many people do you know that can design and build a scalable socket server with a built-in, highly-concurrent messaging system? Come on.

Okay, full disclosure. We've actually built a prototype. We'd never put it in production as is, but it validated a lot of our ideas about the feasibility of the project. We're thinking about pursuing it, but we'd like to know how many business applications it has right now.

So, tell us what you think. If you could deploy your code to an application server like this, what could you do that you can't do now?