Unified API of WebSocket and HTTP long polling/streaming for Clojure

Unified API of WebSocket and HTTP long polling/streaming for Clojure(http-kit.org)

58 points by fshen 13 years ago | 10 comments

polskibus 13 years ago |

This seems similar to SignalR in .NET world, would you mind comparing the two feature-wise ?

shenedu 13 years ago | |

I am afraid http-kit is much feature less than SignalR. SignalR provides client side javascript[1], and hubs. http-kit provide non of these. http-kit just provide a way to get a Channel that can be used to push data to client, The Channel can be WebSocket or HTTP (long polling/streaming). IMO, http-kit is more like a unix command line tool, tiny and focus.

Socket.IO[2] is more like SignalR compare to http-kit.

[1] jquery.signalR-1.0.1.min.js [2] http://socket.io/

donjigweed 13 years ago |

Hi Feng,

Great work! I know it's quite complicated, but how are the plans for https support coming along?

Kudos to you and Peter on a great library!

shenedu 13 years ago | |

Thanks for the kind words.

For the server, https is not planed, since It's better be done by Nginx or something alike [1].

For the client, https is planed. We have use case for it, too. Some time is needed to work on it. It will come out in one or two month, I guess.

[1] http://http-kit.org/migration.html#https

ceslami 13 years ago |

I, and many others, want to use this in production. Is the API solidified, as per version 2.0.0?

shenedu 13 years ago | |

Yes, it's 2.0.0, that's a promise of the API. No API breaks after 2.0.0 get released (It's already released today).

To tell the truth, I, Peter[1], and a few others take more than a month to think and discuss the API, even though there are just few functions to export. We try our best to make it better. In the end, I think, We are quite happy with what we get now: the unified API.

If a very good idea found to do the API, but the API would break, then it's version 3. But version 2 will still be maintained, and any bugs will get fixed. That's the promise.

Is this address your concern?

[1] https://github.com/ptaoussanis

toisanji 13 years ago |

How does compare with all the other async offerings for clojure like aleph and pure netty?

espeed 13 years ago | |

See https://github.com/ptaoussanis/clojure-web-server-benchmarks

matthavener 13 years ago | |

I'm curious how it compares to pedestal.io

shenedu 13 years ago | | |

pedestal is quite a large project, try to offer a complete solution for building web application in Clojure, from server side to client side, to tooling.

http-kit is a very small and focused library, It just do one thing: talk in HTTP. http-kit need to work together with other libraries like Ring[1] and Compojure[2] to do the server side.

Few good things about http-kit: 1. Very fast and scalable, almost as fast as what you can get from the hardware. 2. Focus, do one thing and do it well, thing about Linux/Unix's philosophy. Personally, I prefer this way of doing software.

[1] https://github.com/ring-clojure/ring [2] https://github.com/weavejester/compojure