Netty in Action

Chapter 12. WebSocket

This chapter covers

• The concept of a real-time web
• The WebSocket protocol
• Building a WebSocket-based chat room server with Netty

If you follow recent developments in web technologies you are likely to come across the phrase real-time web, and if you have had experience with real-time applications in engineering domains, you may be a little skeptical about what this term implies.

So let’s clarify at the outset that this is not about so-called hard real-time Quality of Service (QoS), where the delivery of computation results within a specified time interval is guaranteed. The request/response design of HTTP alone makes that highly problematic, as evidenced by the fact that none of the approaches devised in the past ...