[web-devel] Implementing SPDY

[Robin Brandt]

Hello there,

I'm currently looking into implementing the SPDY [1] protocol based on
Warp. I read in the archives that Daniel Sommermann wanted to start
something similar for snap-server but I haven't seen any updates for
some time. So if you've got a finished implementation somewhere in
your drawer this would be a great time to publish it ;)

Otherwise I'd start with the parser for the framing layer. SPDY
compresses some parts of the frames using zlib. Michael already merged
a small patch I wrote into zlib-bindings to support initial
dictionaries so I think I'm ready to go there.

Another thing that is needed to fully support SPDY is TLS. I think I'd
use the tls library by Vincent here. There is some implementation work
needed in the library for an extension called NPN (next protocol
negotiation) which SPDY uses. Vincent offered to help here. Thanks :)
(By the way, although it's possible to force at least Chrome to use
non-encrypted connections "it'll break all sorts of things" according
to the SPDY book [2]).

With this post I'd like to start a discussion about the implementation
and interfaces of this so the result can be reused in other contexts
(e.g. for Snap). If you've got any suggestions and sources of
inspiration I'm happy to hear them.

Best regards,
Robin


[1] http://dev.chromium.org/spdy
[2] http://spdybook.com/