Stupid question, but just making sure here:
When should I use TCP over HTTP? Are there any examples where one is better than the other?
TCP is full-duplex 2-way communication. HTTP uses request/response model. Let's see if you are writing a chat or messaging application. TCP will work much better because you can notify the client immediately. While with HTTP, you have to do some tricks like long-polling.
However, TCP is just byte stream. You have to find another protocol over it to define your messages. You can use Google's ProtoBuffer for that.
Use HTTP if you need the services it provides -- e.g., message framing, caching, redirection, content metadata, partial responses, content negotiation -- as well as a large number of well-understood tools, implementations, documentation, etc.
Use TCP if you can't work within those constraints. However, if you use TCP you'll be creating a new application protocol, which has a number of pitfalls.
Related
How is using asynchronous HTTP Requests different from using Messages when it comes to sending data in ZeroMQ?
A http request is simply the use of the hypertext transport protocol used over IP between two machines, client and server. It can be used for moving data in either direction. There's no particular restrictions as to what that data can be. An asynchronous request is simply one where the requester isn't bothering to wait for the reply having made the request; it'll use some mechanism to later rendezvous with the request, whenever that happens to come in.
Sending a message through ZeroMQ can be somewhat similar, specifically the REQ/REP pattern (request, reply). Similar to a http request, the requester will send some sort of message and the replier will reply in some way, and strictly in this pattern.
ZeroMQ uses its own protocol, zmtp, to move messages around. Again, there's nothing really limiting what data is in a message. ZeroMQ is inherently asynchronous - it's implementing the Actor programming model (though I notice that the way some implementations in some languages have eroded ZeroMQ's simplicity w.r.t. that, fitting into the language's own way of being asynchronous rather than use a poll funcion provided by ZeroMQ).
However, ZeroMQ builds many more data distribution patterns than req/rep on top of zmtp, like pub/sub, dealer/router, that http simply has no equivalent of. Further differences are that ZeroMQ can use IP, interprocess comms, or in-memory transports; this makes it highly suited for both in-application use, and for inter-machine distributed applications. I guess that a webserver could be contacted over ipc too, but I've never heard of anyone bothering to do that. Http is expected to be used over specific ports (e.g. port 80), whereas ZMQ gets used on whatever ports the developer wants (obeying the normal port allocation rules if they want a quiet life).
I am wondering about the difference between HTTP and TCP data transfer protocols for online games.
I have heard many people using TCP or UDP to transfer data between client and server for online games.
But can you use http at all? I know http is mostly used for web browsing, but if I could set up web server and let my game applications use GET and POST methods, I can still send data back and forth right? Is it that this way of communicating is too slow or unnecessary?
And just one thing about TCP transmission protocols, if I were to write some gaming application using TCP, is it that the data are usually transferred using something called "sockets" (like Socket classes in Java)? What about UDP?
Thanks very much!
Appreciate any answer!
HTTP is an additional layer on top of TCP that defines what a request looks like, what a response looks like, and how the connection is closed or maintained across requests. You can either use it or not use it, depending on what you actually need to transport. If your game consists of a series of requests that each get a reply, HTTP might make sense. If it's more like unsolicited messages in each direction, making HTTP work is like putting a square peg in a round hole.
Most platforms provide a socket interface that allows you to work with either TCP or UDP depending on the protocol specified when the socket is allocated. Some higher-level APIs look completely different for different protocols.
This might be a dumb question, however, I have been continually frustrated by what seems to be a big gap in every explanation I've seen of protocols like XMPP or HTML. So basically, when I've read documentation on either, in general, it will describe the structure of the data sent back and forth through the protocol, but it does not explain exactly how this data is transferred. It's one thing to provide an example of, say, a generic HTTP request, but it is something else to explain how this text is actually sent to the server.
I guess posed another way, what resources are there out there for learning best practices for implementing text-based protocols? At their core, are all text-based protocols basically the exact same thing? How, for example, would it differ at the binary level, were I to say send the text content of an HTTP request over IRC vs however it is done natively by HTTP?
If I wanted to develop my own, simple textual protocol, what would be the best way to send the text to a client? Does the content itself even really matter? What I mean is that, obviously, HTTP and XMPP are rather different protocols, but do they differ in terms of how the text is transferred between computer to computer?
HTTP, IRC and XMPP are all sent on top of TCP, which is a protocol that provides a bidirectional stream between two endpoints (IP address + port). Under the hood, the data you send is split into separate packets, sent across the network, and reassembled on the other end, so that the recipient just sees a stream of incoming data - except when something goes wrong; there is a somewhat accessible description here.
What that means is that while the application protocol (HTTP, XMPP etc) is different, the underlying transport mechanism is exactly the same. It would be possible (perhaps even interesting) to implement HTTP on top of IRC: an HTTP/IRC client enters a channel, sends the HTTP request as messages to the channel, line by line, a server is present in the channel, reads the request and sends the response the same way - but transporting HTTP over IRC is fundamentally different from transporting HTTP over TCP. The former means layering an application protocol over another application protocol (and the IRC connection needs to go over TCP anyway), while the latter is an application protocol over a transport protocol, which is the way things usually are done (except for various kinds of proxies).
Hope that makes some sense...
that's the question.
Dose anyone know?
I wonder If I could develop a UDP protocol based application to enhance service response.
There is a reason HTTP uses TCP. TCP provides reliability, e.g. no lost, no duplicate and no reordered data. This features are necessary, so that you don't get any broken content back from the server and no broken uploads. Of course you can re-implement this in UDP - but I doubt that you will have improved response time compared to TCP when you are done.
I was considering doing a chat server using node.js/socket.io. Should I make it a tcp server or a http server? I'd imagine tcp server would be more efficient, but can you send other stuff to it like file attachments etc? If tcp is more efficient, how much more so? Also, just wondering how many concurrent connections can one node.js server handle? Is it more work to do TCP or HTTP?
You are talking about 2 totally different approaches here - TCP is a transport layer protocol and HTTP is an application layer protocol. HTTP (usually) operates over TCP, so whichever option you choose, it will still be operating over TCP.
The efficiency question is sort of a moot point, because you are talking about different OSI layers. If you went for raw TCP sockets, your solution would probably be more efficient - in bandwidth at least - since HTTP contains a whole bunch of extra data (the headers) that would likely be irrelevant to your purposes (depending on the scale of the chat program). What you are talking about developing there is your own application layer protocol.
You can send anything you like over TCP - after all HTTP can send attachments, and that operates over TCP. FTP also operates over TCP, and that is designed purely for transferring "attachments". In order to do this, you would need to write your protocol so that it was able to tell the remote party that the following data was a file, then send the file data, then tell the remote party that the transfer is complete. Implementations of this are many and varied (the HTTP approach is completely different from the FTP approach) and your options are pretty much infinite.
I don't know for sure about the node.js connection limit, but I can say with a fair amount of confidence that it is limited by the operating system. This might help you get to grips with the answer to that question.
It is debatable whether it is more work to do it with TCP or HTTP - it's a lot of work to do it in both. I would probably lean more toward the TCP option being your best bet. While TCP would require you to design a protocol rather than/as well as an application, HTTP is not particularly suited to live, 2-way applications like chat servers. There are many implementations of chat over HTTP that use AJAX, but I can tell you from painful experience that they are a complete pain in the rear-end.
I would say that you should only be looking at HTTP if you are intending the endpoint (i.e. the client) to be a browser. If you are going to write a desktop app for the endpoint, a direct TCP link would definitely be the way to go. The main reason for this is that HTTP works in a request-response manner, where the client sends a request to the server, and the server responds. Over TCP you can open a single TCP stream, that can be used for bi-directional communication. This means that the server can push an event to the client instantly, while over HTTP you have to wait for the client to send a request, so you can respond with an event. If you were intending to use a browser as the client, it will make the whole file transfer thing much more tricky (the sending at least).
There are ways to implement this over HTTP using long-polling and server push (read this) but it can be a real pain to implement.
If you are going to implement this on a LAN (or possibly even over the internet) it is worth considering UDP over TCP - in a chat application it is not usually absolutely mission critical that messages arrive in the right order, and even if it was, users would probably not be able to type faster than the variations in network latency (probably <100ms). Then for file transfers you could either negotiate a seperate TCP socket for the data exchange (like FTP), or implement some kind of UDP ACK system (like TFTP).
I feel there is a lot more to say on this subject but right now I can't put it into words - I may extend this answer at some point.
Chat servers are the Hello World program in node. Use http.
As far as the question of how many concurrent connections can it handle, that all depends on your system. Set up a simple chat server and then try benchmarking it.
Also, check out http://search.npmjs.org/ and search for chat for a few pointers.