News from MS Open Tech: Initial HTTP Speed+Mobility Open Source Prototype Now Available for Download

Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. has just published an initial open source prototype implementation of HTTP Speed+Mobility. The prototype is available for download on html5labs.com, where you will also find pointers to the source code.

The IETF HTTPbis workgroup met in Paris at the end of March to discuss how to approach HTTP 2.0 in order to meet the needs of an ever larger and more diverse web. It would be hard to downplay the importance of this work: it will impact how billions of devices communicate over the internet for years to come, from low-powered sensors, to mobile phones, to tablets, to PCs, to network switches, to the largest datacenters on the planet.

Prior to that IETF meeting, Jean Paoli and Sandeep Singhal announced in their post to the Microsoft Interoperability blog that Microsoft has contributed the HTTP Speed+Mobility proposal as input to that conversation.

The prototype implements the websocket-based session layer described in the proposal, as well as parts of the multiplexing logic incorporated from Google’s SPDY proposal. The code does not support header compression yet, but it will in upcoming refreshes.

The open source software comprises a client implemented in C# and a server implemented in Node.js running on Windows Azure. The client is a command line tool that establishes a connection to the server and can download a set of web pages that include html files, scripts, and images. We have made available on the server some static versions of popular web pages like http://www.microsoft.com and http://www.ietf.org, as well as a handful of simpler test pages.

We invite you to inspect the open source code directly in order to familiarize yourself with how everything works; we have also made available a readme file at this location describing the various options available, as well as the meaning of the output returned to the console.

So, please download the prototype, try it out, and let us know what you think: every developer is a stakeholder in the HTTP 2.0 standardization process. We look forward to hearing your feedback, and to applying it to upcoming iterations of the prototype code.

Adalberto Foresti
Senior Program Manager
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation