Why not WebSockets in Vaadin Core?

Flow
1

I know that there have been some recent hiccups with a couple of browsers turning off default support for WebSockets until some security concerns are addressed. Regardless, WebSockets’ support in HTML5 appears to be the future of server to client notifications.

Just as Matti Tahvonen felt when he wrote http://vaadin.com/forum/-/message_boards/message/242225, I also have a philosophical issue with Vaadin programmers having to “tell the browser” that something has changed. The whole beauty of Vaadin is to make the programmer forget about the browser. If I had to work on such plumbing issues, I might as well use a different UI toolkit and deal with Ajax and other data / control interchange between the browser and the server. In other words, I’d like Vaadin to hide “server push” from me as much as it hides Ajax from me.

So I have a couple of questions:

  1. Has the Vaadin team seen enough evidence that WebSockets is here to stay and therefore WebSockets will be the platform for Vaadin to base server->browser notifications?

  2. If the answer to Question 1 is yes, when does Vaadin team plan on including server->browser notification in Vaadin Core? I guess there is a ticket on this already: http://dev.vaadin.com/ticket/111

Matti’s Don’tPush is a great start. I’d love to see Vaadin absorb it into the Core.

Thanks

2

I’m not one of the developers,
but have looked at this also.

The problem with websockets is that:

  • It has a major design flaw in security

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/12/websockets-disabled-in-firefox-4/

  • It is not yet available in most browsers

When you look at http://vaadin.com/roadmap
you see that for Vaadin 7 server push is scheduled…
If it will be based on websockets or on some kind of
other push system does not matter for me.

Today you can already include icepush in your app

http://vaadin.com/directory#addon/icepush

André