7 ms·

So, in a nutshell, we're seeing a swing back to RPC. I think that's great, bidirectional RPC is much nicer than REST. REST is great, but a good portion of the

So, in a nutshell, we're seeing a swing back to RPC. I think that's great, bidirectional RPC is much nicer than REST. REST is great, but a good portion of the time proper rest begins to feel like square peg round hole, that's why we see endless discussions of 'proper' rest.

javascriptlol 15y ago
Unfortunately, during our circle back to the 1970's we lost UDP, which is essential for real time protocols.
- udp 15y ago
  Exactly. Flash sockets are TCP only (proprietary Adobe protocols aside), and it seems WebSockets ended up without any UDP support either. The overhead of TCP is just ridiculous when you're trying to implement real-time game movements with dead reckoning, etc.
  - drawkbox 15y ago
    Unity has UDP sockets and yes all good games that require fast real-time action need UDP. Adobe had it partially in their latest Flash Media Server RTMFP protocol but it was very limited. RUDP or Reliable UDP is the best of both. Here's some great info on UDP vs TCP and only using one or the other: UDP vs TCP http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/udp-vs-tcp/ http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/udp... Characteristics of UDP Packet Loss: Effect of TCP Traffic http://www.isoc.org/INET97/proceedings/F3/F3_1.HTM http://www.isoc.org/INET97/proceedings/F3/F3_1.HTM
    - waffle_ss 15y ago
      RUDP sounds very weird... why would you use it instead of TCP? At a glance, it looks like the only difference is RUDP doesn't enforce packets being received in-order (being a message-based protocol), while TCP does (being a stream-based protocol).
      - drawkbox 15y ago
        The great thing about UDP with a reliable layer on top is you can choose if you want an ACK back for any 'critical' data. Otherwise you can just ignore order or whether the endpoint receives it or not. It is a broadcast rather than a hard line essentially. For instance let's say you have some physics update and for some reason you needed it networked, with many objects, receiving only 70% of those for many different elements may be just fine (discarding any you receive after that are older maybe for this example)...you may not need reliable acknowledgement that they received for most of them if any. But you definitely need to know when an enemy is killed so you make that a critical message to the server RPC'd to the clients and use a reliable flag which then will expect validation. Same with ordering... use when needed with RUDP or custom layer on UDP for reliability. TCP does all this for you and works great for files/http etc. but doing this for all messages is great overkill in real-time games lower than turn based. And mixing TCP/UDP arguably causes some slowdown to UDP due to TCP queuing. RUDP solves all these issues and is flexible to reliable messages and just firehose broadcast. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliable_User_Datagram_Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliable_User_Datagram_Protocol Designed by none other than Bell Labs... Also SCTP was created to solve RUDP like issues as an official standard (RUDP is a draft) but standards take time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Pro...
      - mikeash 15y ago
        Enforcing order is hugely important. With TCP, if you lose a packet, all incoming data to the app stops until it's recovered. This is disastrous for an app which can withstand some data being late but needs most of it to show up fast.
  - hello_moto 15y ago
    I think people would probably build their own communication protocol on top of UDP but not at the level of TCP, if they were given UDP support. I'm not saying that's good or bad. Back in college on a distributed systems course, one of the projects was exactly to build that because the professor wanted to produce somewhere between UDP (more than) to TCP (less than).
- greggman 15y ago
  On the one hand there are tons off applications that don't need UDP and will do just fine with WebSockets. Lots of AJAX based sites can be made much more responsive through WebSockets. Email sites, sites like Google Docs, etc. Chat sites like Meebo or Google Talk. Even many types of games will do just fine with WebSockets. A WoW style game, a Diablo style game, etc. On the other hand they, the w3c and the browser vendors, are working on unreliable (ie, UDP) peer to peer standard based off the WebRTC stuff so for those applications that can tolerate the unreliableness (ie, voip, video and real time games) it's not far off.
  - javascriptlol 15y ago
    Thanks! I didn't know about WebRTC, so this seems like good news. Is it tailored to video/audio or are we talking about something you can design a protocol on top of?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
icebraining 15y ago
bidirectional RPC is much nicer than REST. I don't see why - REST seems extremely elegant to me. In any case, they solve completely different problems. REST is a set of constraints that ensure your architecture will be scalable, reliable, efficient (by allowing multiple levels of caching), easy to evolve (by being extremely decoupled) and linkable. WebSockets throw away all that to ensure you can have low latency realtime bidirectional communications.
- mythz 15y ago
  They don't throw it away, they just don't add the unnecessary cruft and overhead to get their stellar latency and response times. There will never be an enviable end-user Single Page Application built on a purely REST architecture style since REST/HATEOS promotes the idea of dumb clients driven by a single server view, in a page-by-page mode Netscape 4 would be proud of. This is great if you're building one of the turn-based games of the 90s but the REST of the world has moved - and the talented kids who can cut stellar client side apps aren't doing it with a restricted HATEOS mindset. So while Google makes arguably the best REST client with Chrome, they're not wasting their time trying to restrict their Single Page Apps around HATEOS constraints. Instead they're investing heavily in trying to move the web forward with technologies that actually improve end-user experience like WebSockets and SPDY - rather than wasting their time chasing REST compliance badges, that's what REST cults do.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    They don't throw it away Of course they do. WebSockets are stateful - immediately less scalable and reliable, since a client is tied to a server during the session -, they can't be cached - much less efficient for images, videos, etc -, are tied to particular implementations instead of standards and aren't linkable. they just don't add the unnecessary cruft and overhead to get their stellar latency and response times. REST doesn't have any "cruft". In fact, REST only restricts, it doesn't add anything. There will never be an enviable end-user Single Page Application built on a purely REST architecture style since REST/HATEOS promotes the idea of dumb clients driven by a single server view, in a page-by-page mode Netscape 4 would be proud of. This is great if you're building one of the turn-based games of the 90s but the REST of the world has moved - and the talented kids who can cut stellar client side apps aren't doing it with a restricted HATEOS mindset. You're mistaken. Nothing about REST or HATEOAS prevents a web application from serving Javascript that then calls a RESTful API dynamically, using PushState to change the current resource URI locally. In fact, pushing and running code on the client (code-on-demand) is one of the constraints (albeit optional) of REST, as specified in Fielding's dissertation. Your claim that REST promotes dumb clients is wrong. So while Google makes arguably the best REST client with Chrome, they're not wasting their time trying to restrict their Single Page Apps around HATEOS constraints. Instead they're investing heavily in trying to move the web forward with technologies that actually improve end-user experience like WebSockets and SPDY What Google service uses Websockets, exactly? And there's nothing unRESTful about SPDY. You don't seem to understand what REST means. REST is not HTTP.

javascriptlol 15y ago

Unfortunately, during our circle back to the 1970's we lost UDP, which is essential for real time protocols.

udp 15y ago
Exactly. Flash sockets are TCP only (proprietary Adobe protocols aside), and it seems WebSockets ended up without any UDP support either. The overhead of TCP is just ridiculous when you're trying to implement real-time game movements with dead reckoning, etc.
- drawkbox 15y ago
  Unity has UDP sockets and yes all good games that require fast real-time action need UDP. Adobe had it partially in their latest Flash Media Server RTMFP protocol but it was very limited. RUDP or Reliable UDP is the best of both. Here's some great info on UDP vs TCP and only using one or the other: UDP vs TCP http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/udp-vs-tcp/ http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/udp... Characteristics of UDP Packet Loss: Effect of TCP Traffic http://www.isoc.org/INET97/proceedings/F3/F3_1.HTM http://www.isoc.org/INET97/proceedings/F3/F3_1.HTM
  - waffle_ss 15y ago
    RUDP sounds very weird... why would you use it instead of TCP? At a glance, it looks like the only difference is RUDP doesn't enforce packets being received in-order (being a message-based protocol), while TCP does (being a stream-based protocol).
    - drawkbox 15y ago
      The great thing about UDP with a reliable layer on top is you can choose if you want an ACK back for any 'critical' data. Otherwise you can just ignore order or whether the endpoint receives it or not. It is a broadcast rather than a hard line essentially. For instance let's say you have some physics update and for some reason you needed it networked, with many objects, receiving only 70% of those for many different elements may be just fine (discarding any you receive after that are older maybe for this example)...you may not need reliable acknowledgement that they received for most of them if any. But you definitely need to know when an enemy is killed so you make that a critical message to the server RPC'd to the clients and use a reliable flag which then will expect validation. Same with ordering... use when needed with RUDP or custom layer on UDP for reliability. TCP does all this for you and works great for files/http etc. but doing this for all messages is great overkill in real-time games lower than turn based. And mixing TCP/UDP arguably causes some slowdown to UDP due to TCP queuing. RUDP solves all these issues and is flexible to reliable messages and just firehose broadcast. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliable_User_Datagram_Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliable_User_Datagram_Protocol Designed by none other than Bell Labs... Also SCTP was created to solve RUDP like issues as an official standard (RUDP is a draft) but standards take time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Pro...
    - mikeash 15y ago
      Enforcing order is hugely important. With TCP, if you lose a packet, all incoming data to the app stops until it's recovered. This is disastrous for an app which can withstand some data being late but needs most of it to show up fast.
- hello_moto 15y ago
  I think people would probably build their own communication protocol on top of UDP but not at the level of TCP, if they were given UDP support. I'm not saying that's good or bad. Back in college on a distributed systems course, one of the projects was exactly to build that because the professor wanted to produce somewhere between UDP (more than) to TCP (less than).
greggman 15y ago
On the one hand there are tons off applications that don't need UDP and will do just fine with WebSockets. Lots of AJAX based sites can be made much more responsive through WebSockets. Email sites, sites like Google Docs, etc. Chat sites like Meebo or Google Talk. Even many types of games will do just fine with WebSockets. A WoW style game, a Diablo style game, etc. On the other hand they, the w3c and the browser vendors, are working on unreliable (ie, UDP) peer to peer standard based off the WebRTC stuff so for those applications that can tolerate the unreliableness (ie, voip, video and real time games) it's not far off.
- javascriptlol 15y ago
  Thanks! I didn't know about WebRTC, so this seems like good news. Is it tailored to video/audio or are we talking about something you can design a protocol on top of?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

icebraining 15y ago

bidirectional RPC is much nicer than REST. I don't see why - REST seems extremely elegant to me. In any case, they solve completely different problems. REST is a set of constraints that ensure your architecture will be scalable, reliable, efficient (by allowing multiple levels of caching), easy to evolve (by being extremely decoupled) and linkable. WebSockets throw away all that to ensure you can have low latency realtime bidirectional communications.

mythz 15y ago
They don't throw it away, they just don't add the unnecessary cruft and overhead to get their stellar latency and response times. There will never be an enviable end-user Single Page Application built on a purely REST architecture style since REST/HATEOS promotes the idea of dumb clients driven by a single server view, in a page-by-page mode Netscape 4 would be proud of. This is great if you're building one of the turn-based games of the 90s but the REST of the world has moved - and the talented kids who can cut stellar client side apps aren't doing it with a restricted HATEOS mindset. So while Google makes arguably the best REST client with Chrome, they're not wasting their time trying to restrict their Single Page Apps around HATEOS constraints. Instead they're investing heavily in trying to move the web forward with technologies that actually improve end-user experience like WebSockets and SPDY - rather than wasting their time chasing REST compliance badges, that's what REST cults do.
- icebraining 15y ago
  They don't throw it away Of course they do. WebSockets are stateful - immediately less scalable and reliable, since a client is tied to a server during the session -, they can't be cached - much less efficient for images, videos, etc -, are tied to particular implementations instead of standards and aren't linkable. they just don't add the unnecessary cruft and overhead to get their stellar latency and response times. REST doesn't have any "cruft". In fact, REST only restricts, it doesn't add anything. There will never be an enviable end-user Single Page Application built on a purely REST architecture style since REST/HATEOS promotes the idea of dumb clients driven by a single server view, in a page-by-page mode Netscape 4 would be proud of. This is great if you're building one of the turn-based games of the 90s but the REST of the world has moved - and the talented kids who can cut stellar client side apps aren't doing it with a restricted HATEOS mindset. You're mistaken. Nothing about REST or HATEOAS prevents a web application from serving Javascript that then calls a RESTful API dynamically, using PushState to change the current resource URI locally. In fact, pushing and running code on the client (code-on-demand) is one of the constraints (albeit optional) of REST, as specified in Fielding's dissertation. Your claim that REST promotes dumb clients is wrong. So while Google makes arguably the best REST client with Chrome, they're not wasting their time trying to restrict their Single Page Apps around HATEOS constraints. Instead they're investing heavily in trying to move the web forward with technologies that actually improve end-user experience like WebSockets and SPDY What Google service uses Websockets, exactly? And there's nothing unRESTful about SPDY. You don't seem to understand what REST means. REST is not HTTP.