Last night was pretty enjoyable, had a nice London HTML5 User Group talk, entitled “EXTREME WEBSOCKETS TAKING YOUR WEB APPS INTO NEW, UNCHARTED TERRITORY” (couldn’t be arsed to fix the capitalisation, sorry!).

The talk focussed on what WebSockets are, how they work, and some real life cases for use. Replacing technologies like COMET and long-polling and streaming is the goal. Examples of real life use that Peter Lubbers (@peterlubbers) highlighted were things such as stock tickers, news feeds, games and many more. Some of the demos are on the Kaazing website at kaazing.me.

Then some real demos showed the possibilities of WebSockets, who knew that using HTML5 Canvas and WebSockets (plus a couple VNC servers) remotely controlling another machine would be possible. Github has given me some example code, but not tested or used this. There was of course one of my favourite canvas and WebSockets examples, Rawkets, the asteroids style massively multiplayer game. Which I am getting quite good at.

While a lot of the technologies people asked about, and some of the technical details of server stuff, were well over my head, I definitely think I can and will use websockets eventually. Probably going to continue on my learn JavaScript properly first, but looking forward to WebSockets and Canvas after that!