The internet has been developed in a way to allow you to share information efficiently and without delays. Information on the internet is transported through a suite of protocols called TCP/IP, which defines the method of sharing information between computers with a decentralized network with reasonable certainty of their arrival in destination.
TCP/IP links the message like origin and destination. The message contains a summary calculated from the origin message that can be used by the receiver to verify that all state information is successfully received.
After the network has spread increasingly and we passed through the HTTP protocol. HTTP provides a level of abstraction bundling TCP/IP connections in a wrapper and contains information on the request and the required data for the application, for example, the form fields or the cookies' values. HTTP requests provide a simple response interface that works well for actions such as receiving a web page, moving and loading data or images, or sending data to a server to make it persistent.
After 2004, there was a high evolution on the development of web applications thanks to Ajax. Web became a more extremely useful and friendly method by which to retrieve and send data server and client side. Ajax is an interface where using JavaScript you can create HTTP requests and handle the response in a asynchronous mode through callback functions.
Before Ajax, you had to wait for the complete loading of the page to receive a little bit of results. With Ajax and a little JavaScript, you have to wait only for the loading of the part of the page you are interested in. So, it became a good practice to provide a single page containing all data. Examples of this are Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter, which give the user a smoother workflow collecting data through the server calls working in background. HTTP was the same since 1999, supporting the transmission of these packets through disposable connections.
Next, the need for real-time communication in the web applications has grown. Online games, reporting systems and chat applications are based on a forced use of the HTTP protocol through polling systems. Examples of polling are Ajax and Comet-persistent HTTP connections. Flash too can open iFrames to poll for new data from the server. Although evolved and spread, these systems had problems as complexity or inefficiencies.
TCP already provides a two-way links system and direct connections through client and server. So why don't take advantage of these features and do a direct connections through browser and server so we can work with asynchronous messages? The idea of WebSocket stems from here.
The WebSocket specification was completed in a good moment in the era of the development of web applications thanks the spread of HTML5 and a large set of related web open technologies. Now this specification is stable and it is supported by many browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer 10 and Safari.
With WebSockets, ends the era of the system polling to receive asynchronous messages and start the direct channel between browser and server, all described in the TCP protocol. Online games for example take advantages becoming more stable and more efficient and performant in the real time. Cooperative online games are now a reality.
With WebSockets, many users at the same time can cooperate inside the browser with immediate responses and requests. All this can be built with WildFly through its open web technologies.