At least with hixie-76, connections would fail to connect if the intermediate proxies are not understanding WebSockets. Now, your connection will succeed, both client and server will believe they can successfully communicate, but communication will not work and die a slow timeout. Not very reliable, is it ?
WebSockets probably. None of the traditional server-side web frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Django, Java Servlets, ...) can deal with them because you need to maintain open connections with each client. That also makes asynchronous I/O important (a feature of nginx over apache).
Most WebSockets solutions are clumsy at best, because you need to run something independent from the rest of your web stack. Unless you use solutions like Wt (http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt).
> A big part of what empowers node to make these kinds of interfaces possible is its asynchronous nature. No longer do you have statelessness imposed from on high by the likes of apache or rails. You can keep intermediate state around in memory just like in any ordinary program.
Should that not be:
A big part of what empowers node to make these kinds of interfaces possible is its "statefull" nature. ...
Really, that it is asynchronous is nice for performance (but only complicates the implementation). But the fact that you keep state in memory is indeed a big win for ease of implementation, and also performance, especially if state is not global but only relates to a single session. Of course, that is usually frowned upon by the web developer community which believes that this somehow hurts scalability (while it actually helps scalability).
An author here. What drop-downs are you referring to? We are a server-side framework (GWT = client-side). That means there is no need to implement a client-server protocol to access server-side resources, which, as application complexity increases, is a huge benefit.
JWt is also the web framework with best support for refactoring (no string-based bindings) and best support for OO design (you can specialize widgets easily).
A JWt application does not rely on JavaScript (unlike GWT) and can be properly indexed by a search engine (unlike GWT). That makes it more general purpose.
I agree, the reverse proxies are becoming a bottle neck. Perhaps we need to team up and contribute it to nginx? It shouldn't be very hard unless their architecture really does not do persistent connections at all (they currently use HTTP 1.0 for requests to a backend) ... Do you have any experience with varnish ?
At least with hixie-76, connections would fail to connect if the intermediate proxies are not understanding WebSockets. Now, your connection will succeed, both client and server will believe they can successfully communicate, but communication will not work and die a slow timeout. Not very reliable, is it ?