The methods of providing real-time data when a browser visits a webpage involve HTTP request and response headers, which contain additional information that introduce latency. If you are visiting a website with stock prices, by the time the browser renders the page the information might be too old, and manually refreshing the page is not an effective solution. Using HTML5 Web Sockets, a full-duplex, bidirectional communications channel that operates through a single socket over the Web, developers can build scalable, real-time Web applications. ObjectRiver, a metadata compiler company for transforming legacy solutions, announced a new platform for generating Web Socket compliant solutions for the emerging Java Web Socket standard JSR356,

Web Sockets is defined in the communications section of the HTML5 specification, and once it is established its data frames can be sent back and forth between the client and the server in full-duplex mode. The data is minimally framed with just two bytes using a terminator with its text frame, unlike binary frames which use a length prefix. In other words Web Sockets dramatically reduces complexity, which is always a good thing for developers.

The new HTML5/Web Socket Compiler Toolkit from ObjectRiver allows enterprise Java developers to generate high-speed low latency bidirectional services that comply with next generation HTML5 Web Socket standards. Web servers supporting this standard include WebLogic 12.1.3, Tomcat 8, Jetty 9.2.3, Glassfish 4, JBoss (Wildfly 8.1.0). ObjectRiver’s toolkit has successfully tested on all of them. According to the company this compiler toolkit is the first of its kind to leverage this standard for rapid development.

 “This is the future for the next generation of Web services,” said Steven Lemmo, CTO of ObjectRiver. “With our compiler technology, you can describe the most complex data structures, and seamlessly communicate between client and server.”

The WebSocket Compiler Toolkit is free for small projects and it is the first public release for the company’s cloud compiler technology, and with the community edition users can develop and deploy professional grade Web Sockets applications. As a commercial grade product it generates code for the new HTML5/Web Sockets JSR356 specification for complex programming solutions.

Many see HTML5 Web Sockets as a significant leap forward in scalability for the web, delivering such a dramatic improvement, Ian Hickson, Google’s (News – Alert) HTML5 specification lead said, "Reducing kilobytes of data to 2 bytes…and reducing latency from 150ms to 50ms is far more than marginal. In fact, these two factors alone are enough to make Web Sockets seriously interesting to Google."