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by ryah 5129 days ago
"not a good fit"

You're speaking of HTTP: the protocol on which a great deal of world's computing infrastructure is being set on top of. The protocol which we are communicating with each other over right now. HTTP on TCP is extremely successful and achieves all it was designed to for and has been extensible to handle much more. There are many basic problems which are abstracted well into stateless request response cycles: file serving, RPC. There was no "mistake" - it was not a bad fit. There are only expanding use-cases involving existing software infrastructure - for which websockets is solution. That's not to say that HTTP is perfect... It could be better in many ways - but it's ridiculous to write off its success and call it a mistake.
1 comments
strictfp 5129 days ago
I am not dismissing HTTP. The mistake I refered to was to limit TCP usage for www by only allowing the request-response oriented HTTP protocol. HTTP is opinionated and its REST-based architecture was explicitly chosen to disallow partial updates of web pages, thusly crippling TCP. But if one wants to build "thick client" type apps the restrictions of HTTP will weigh you down hard. Allowing for unrestricted TCP usage makes a lot more sense in that case, and is exactly what WebSockets delivers.

One can argue that we were better off with the pure REST web before XmlHttpRequest, in fact I am inclined to agree there, but the crippling of TCP was bound to be cracked. The real humor is that the crack is now re-launched as a new great feature, when it was explicitly excluded for the break-down of REST that it causes.

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MichaelGG 5129 days ago
You say HTTP crippled TCP so as to not break-down REST. HTTP 1.0 does not seem to be designed for REST; it doesn't seem that REST was really published until quite a while later. Calling HTTP "REST-based" seems a bit of a stretch.

On top of that, could you give a few examples of what you actually mean? Like what would a partial update be?

TCP seems like a perfect fit for the underlying transport for a request/response model; I don't see how choosing it is some sort of deliberate "crippling". What should they have done? Built a custom request/response protocol on top of IP? Isn't that just crippling IP's flexibility as a layer 3 protocol? I don't understand your objections.

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strictfp 5129 days ago
Roy Fielding was involved in HTTP 1.0 and I believe that REST was a generalization of some of the principles used therein. I explained the breakdown in another comment, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4033717
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strictfp 5128 days ago
I'm not saying that TCP was a super-bad choice, just that they wanted only a subset of the features and got a bit more than they wanted. Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4033822 .
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