On 05/06/2012 22:16, Ravi wrote: > > Mark you are absolutely right if you only talk about future applications > with latest technologies and only specific use cases like chat > applications. > > However there are billions of people whose browsers/phones will not be > upgraded for years. Also a lot of existing applications and existing web > libraries are built around requests and sessions. > > As a practical example, I have an existing smartphone app that works > with a tomcat webapp. Firing a HTTP request for each action is slow and > I would like to use websockets, however I am faced with following options: > > 1. develop different versions of my app, one for users who have latest > phones/browsers and another one for users who do not. This means double > the cost of developing and maintaining. > > 2. manually try to retrofit websockets to existing app/libraries so I do > not end up maintaining two versions. Most web libraries/frameworks > assume presence of request/session. Even in JEE servlet classes, many > methods take httprequest as an input parameter. So this is also not easy. > > 3. stay with http as that works across all existing browsers/phones. > i.e. do not use websockets. > > Websockets will be lot more useful if both client and server sides can > seamlessly fallback to http when websockets are not available. This will > make it easy to upgrade existing apps, support all kinds of users > (including IE6), develop single app that works on android (android has > no websocket support) and iphone ... and so on > > I hope I was able to communicate what I was trying to do.
Then use a framework that sits on top of WebSocket / HTTP / Comet / a.n. other protocol and abstracts the protocol away from the application code. Something like Atmosphere. You'll still need to re-write your app but you'll only need to do it once. WebSocket != HTTP and you simply can't replace one with the other. Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org
