Advantages of Websockets | disadvantages of Websockets

This page covers advantages and disadvantages of Websockets over HTTP used in IoT (Internet of Things). It mentions benefits or advantages of Websockets and drawbacks or disadvantages of Websockets.

What are Websockets?

Introduction:
Websockets is a technology for bidirectional communication over single (TCP) socket, a type of PUSH technology. It is a protocol which provides bidirectional, full duplex communication channels over a single TCP socket. It is designed to be implemented in web browsers and web servers, but it can be used by any client or server application.

Websockets

The figure depicts messages exchanged between client and server. As shown websocket uses handshake messages to establish or open connection where as HTTP uses request-response messaging mechanism. HTTP is half duplex where as websocket is full duplex.

It is a protocol which enables developers to open a persistent connection and send data in realtime between a client and a server. Messages can be sent between the single TCP socket connection (simultaneously or back and forth).

Benefits or advantages of Websockets over HTTP

Following are the benefits or advantages of Websockets over HTTP:
➨It supports duplex communication.
➨Using websockets, one can send and receive data immediately faster than HTTP. Moreover they are faster than AJAX.
➨Cross origin communication (however this poses security risks).
➨Cross platform compatibility (web, desktop, mobile)
➨HTTP takes upto 2000 bytes of overhead where as websocket takes only 2 bytes.
➨Replace long polling
➨Websockets are data typed but AJAX calls can only send string datatypes.

Drawbacks or disadvantages of Websockets

Following are the drawbacks or disadvantages of Websockets:
➨Web browser must be fully HTML5 compliant.
➨Websockets has no success functions like AJAX.
➨Intermediary/Edge caching is not possible with websockets unlike HTTP.
➨To build even simple protocol of your own, one can not be able to use friendly HTTP statuses, body etc.
➨If application does not require a lot of dynamic interaction, HTTP is much simpler to implement.



Advantages and Disadvantages of other Sensor Types

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AMQP and MQTT Related Links

AMQP vs JMS
MQTT protocol basics
MQTT vs HTTP
MQTT vs REST

What is difference between

MQTT vs HTTP   Difference between OSI and TCPIP layers  Difference between TCP UDP  FTP vs HTTP   FTP vs SMTP   FTP vs TFTP   ARP vs RARP   NAT vs PAT   RIP vs OSPF  SLIP vs PPP  IMAP4 vs POP3  IPV4 vs IPV6 

IoT (Internet of Things) Wireless Technologies

WLAN    ➤THREAD    ➤EnOcean    ➤LoRa    ➤SIGFOX    ➤WHDI   
Zigbee   ➤6LoWPAN   ➤Zigbee RF4CE   ➤Z-Wave   ➤NFC   ➤RFID   ➤INSTEON  

RF and Wireless Terminologies