Following the series of posts discussing AJAX calls, today we’ll see what is going to be its evolution: Web Sockets. It’s still a very new technology, and support is starting to be implemented in most major browsers and web servers. But don’t count on using it yet, since most of the clients of your web app will not be able to use them. I’ll discuss web sockets here just so you know what the future is going to bring to the web apps world.

The history: the beginning of AJAX

The world wide web and the Internet started as a stateless content delivery mechanism, taking a step backwards compared to traditional desktop applications. Early Internet applications needed to explicitly request every piece of information, and the server sent only the requested data.

Then came what we now call “Web 2.0 application development”: Dynamic HTML, heavy usage of JavaScript, AJAX, and various plugins (Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight). These applications were dynamic and responsive, and they brought much of that rich interactive experience users enjoyed in desktop client/server applications to the Internet. However, due to the request and response architecture that these applications are based on, the latest Rich Internet Applications still cannot match the connectivity and the capability to get real-time data that client/server applications had more than a decade ago.

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