With a few days of delay I’m here reporting and commenting the last revolutions about the protocol of the web, its upcoming groundbreaking new version and its state.
A few days back Mark Nottingham announced that the
group is officially working on the new draft of HTTP/2.0:
even though rumors about the shape of this new version were
going on since a couple years, this official
news brings some fresh hope on the topic.
As the HTTP protocol was always directly influenced
by great minds (Tim Berners-Lee and Roy Fielding, just
to mention a couple names) when I first heard about
Mark taking the responsability to publish HTTP/2.0 I
was pretty sure something great would have come out of
his mind.
I wasn’t wrong.
It’s been 13 years since HTTP doesnt see a major change
in its specification (recent changes are the addition of
the PATCH method, for example, but we’re talking about
minor stuff) and SPDY – a new protocol created by Google –
came out in the recent history of the web with a disruptive
force.
HTTP needed something.
SPDY
But before having a look at what HTTP/2.0 will look like,
let’s mention the good things that SPDY brings on the table:
- prioritization: it allows to send different requests and tell the server to prioritize some of them
- multiplexing: allows parallel requests and asynchronous responses, unlike pipelining which is bound to multiple requests/responses at the same time
- server push: servers can now push resources to the client without them having to ask for
- better performances: extended compression is one of the key FTW of SPDY
But there is one things that SPDY doesn’t change at all: the interface between the machines.
As recognized worldwide, the HTTP protocol was an almost perfect example of M2M interface which allows servers and clients to follow DAPs (domain-application protocols) according to a loosely coupled interface – the protocol itself, with its verbs, semantics and workflows1.
So SPDY, recognizing the perfection of the contract that HTTP puts among clients and servers, isn’t a real new protocol, it’s a better implementation of the same interface.
HTTP/2.0 is an evolution of an evolution
No wonder, then, in reading the words of Nottingham, as, after
all, he “just” announced that HTTP/2.0 will be based on SPDY:
a great news that is basically telling you the “don’t reinvent the wheel”
principle is even applied at the foundation of the web2.
The layers will definitely be different, but, again, I think that having a newer version of our beloved protocol, based on a specification which already improves it and adds tons of new and interesting features, is going to be a game-changer for web applications.
Will we see HTTP/2.0 being deployed with multiplexing, server push,
prioritization and extended compression next year?