Latest WebSockets Release Interoperates with Firefox, Eclipse's Jetty

by Peter Galli on March 11, 2011 01:23pm

Today the Interoperability team here at Microsoft updated the the WebSockets prototype on our HTML5 Labs site, which brings the implementation in line with the recently released WebSockets 06 Protocol Specification. 

We have extended our interoperability testing so that now, along with LibWebSockets, interoperability was tested with Jetty, an open-source project providing an HTTP server, HTTP client, and javax.servlet container, developed by the Eclipse community, and code was tested with a Firefox Mindfield version with an implementation of the 06 Protocol Specification.

WebSockets interoperability was tested between our HTML5 Labs prototype client and Jetty server, which recently added support for the 06 version of the spec (you can find the Jetty code here.)

WebSockets interoperability was also tested with a test Firefox build that supports the 06 protocol specification. A chat demo page is hosted on Azure, which can be opened in Firefox and will use native browser WebSocket instead of the Silverlight-based one.

WebSockets is a technology designed to simplify much of the complexity around bi-directional, full-duplex communications channels, over a single Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) socket. It can be implemented in web browsers, web servers as well as used by any client or server application.

This fourth update of our WebSocket prototype brings ping-pong support: automatic client to server ping every 50 seconds. It also now supports the binary and fragment frames feature defined in the WebSocket protocol specification, but they are not yet exposed to javascript because the W3C API working group is still working on defining a set of APIs that can work with binary data.

Read Claudio Caldato's blog post for all the details on this.