What is the fundamental difference between WebSockets and pure TCP?

tcp websocket
xap4o picture xap4o · Apr 21, 2010 · Viewed 53.9k times · Source

I've read about WebSockets and I wonder why browser couldn't simply open trivial TCP connection and communicate with server like any other desktop application. And why this communication is possible via websockets?

Answer

Ash picture Ash · Apr 21, 2010

It's easier to communicate via TCP sockets when you're working within an intranet boundary, since you likely have control over the machines on that network and can open ports suitable for making the TCP connections.

Over the internet, you're communicating with someone else's server on the other end. They are extremely unlikely to have any old socket open for connections. Usually they will have only a few standard ones such as port 80 for HTTP or 443 for HTTPS. So, to communicate with the server you are obliged to connect using one of those ports.

Given that these are standard ports for web servers that generally speak HTTP, you're therefore obliged to conform to the HTTP protocol, otherwise the server won't talk to you. The purpose of web sockets is to allow you to initiate a connection via HTTP, but then negotiate to use the web sockets protocol (assuming the server is capable of doing so) to allow a more "TCP socket"-like communication stream.

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