Categories: CodingGraphsMEST

Application protocol over a WebSocket?

While working on a demonstrator app for the Reactive + Graph system I’ve been building in my spare time, I found myself wanting to implement a RESTful app protocol on top of WebSockets for in-browser app <-> service communication. I actually searched for “HTTP over WebSockets” but couldn’t find anything promising.

Does anyone know of anything in this space?

The idea is to use one-way messaging as the foundation and build request-response pattern on top. This way I can implement a “subscribe” operation which is necessary for streaming of messages from the service to the browser (and the other way around at some point 🙂

My head got filled up with memories of all the discussions around SOAP/REST and Jim’s and my work on MEST and SSDL (cached version of the original site which is no longer on the web) from more than 10 years ago. Fun times.

Update: I should really be looking at an implementation of HTTP/2 since it has everything I need… single connection, one-way messaging, push from the server, and the familiar verbs/resource-oriented nature of HTTP over the same single connection.

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about