Accelerate with Google SPDY
It is a reality that Google, at the moment, is engrossed with the task of developing a new application layer protocol designed to accelerate the movement of stuff across the web. The new application layer protocol is called SPDY and many have started considering that this may initiate a new era.
Unveiled only on Thursday with a post to the Google Research blog, this "early-stage" research project is exclusively designed to lessen latency through concepts like multiplexed streams, request prioritization, and HTTP header compression. Have you gone through the blog post? It is entitled A 2x faster web.
It has to be accepted that the research arm of Google has already developed a prototype web server and, certainly, Google Chrome client that take advantage of the protocol. In the lab, Google says it does perceive "up to" a 55 per cent improvement while downloading the web's top 25 sites over simulated home connections. "There is still a lot of work we need to do to evaluate the performance of SPDY in real-world conditions. However, we believe that we have reached the stage where our small team could benefit from the active participation, feedback and assistance of the web community," the company says.In its post, Google connoted that good ol' http has need of an update: "HTTP is an elegantly simple protocol that emerged as a web standard in 1996 after a series of experiments. HTTP has served the web incredibly well. We want to continue building on the web's tradition of experimentation and optimization, to further support the evolution of websites and browsers."
However, Google's documentation explains that SPDY is not a way of replacing http. It will create a session between the HTTP application layer and the TCP transport layer. That said, this session uses an HTTP-like request-response setup.
"SPDY replaces some parts of HTTP, but mostly augments it," reads a Google FAQ. "At the highest level of the application layer, the request-response protocol remains the same. SPDY still uses HTTP methods, headers, and other semantics. But SPDY overrides other parts of the protocol, such as connection management and data transfer formats."
