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By Tom Groenfeldt
Achieving client-server speeds with a browser over the Internet has long been a dream among technologists. No software to install and maintain, no need to send CDs to clients and hope they will update fixes -- just change an application on the server and it immediately goes into production for users around the world the next time they log on.
Web applications have been limited to functions that are not time-critical because of the Web's design, said Alistair Croll, director of marketing at Kaazing in Mountain View, Calif.
"Web-based applications are undergoing a fundamental change," he explained. "They were based on a document-centric request-and-response model. The browser would go to the server, ask for a page, and the server would deliver. There was a lot of overhead in the conversation describing the message and the end of the message."
Change will be based on a new function in HTML called Web sockets, he added, and system integrators and application developers are already investigating them. Web sockets allow the client to establish a two-way communication with a server but places the application within the browser to reduce the amount of work required from the server. Rather than talking Web, which the server has to translate, the browser can talk to the application directly and reduce overhead.
For a company like Morgan Stanley that wants to use the open source messaging protocol AMQP to handle thousands of messages a second, the normal approach would be to write a big application that talked AMQP on the server and Web on the client.
"That's what application servers do," said Croll. "Imagine instead that you could write an application for the Web browser and connect it straight to AMQP on the network. That's what Kaazing does. You can write rich Internet applications on the browser and connect it to whatever application you are running on your LAN without a Web gateway conversion."
This approach has drawn early users from banks, the gaming industry, hedge funds and telecommunications companies that want to send messages to thousands of phones.
"Anytime you need to replace one-way communications, this is a very good opportunity for scaling," he said. "People think the Web is the Internet, but the reality is that there are protocols which are more efficient. The Web is the lowest common denominator."
Facebook, which recently initiated chat, is said to have bought 15,000 servers to support the new functionality, added Croll. If they had used Kaazing, they could have done the same thing with about 700 servers. "You can get an order-of-magnitude increase by architecting properly."
This moves Web browsers away from a model where the client always initiates the conversation and moves the communication from one-way to bi-directional. The new protocols allow one-to-one, one-to-many and guaranteed delivery.
"This changes the rules on the way the Internet is built; load balancers, firewalls, clients and servers will change," said Croll. "The advantage is that consumers like [using Web applications] better; it is faster, easier to use and easier to manage than software on a desktop."
Kaazing has announced support for Microsoft's Silverlight, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation media experiences and rich interactive applications. Silverlight is already powering thousands of applications around the world and organizations including Entertainment Tonight, the NBA and NBC Universal to deliver superior Web-based experiences to their customers.
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