What is the WebSockets alternative in the HTTP/2 world?

websocket server-sent-events http2 server-push

Nikola Obreshkov · Oct 15, 2017 · Viewed 12.2k times · Source

The new HTTP/2 protocol comes with some promising features. Some of them:

Multiplexing - a single TCP connection can be used to make multiple HTTP/2 requests and receive multiple responses (to a single origin)
HTTP/2 Server Push - sending server responses to the client without receiving requests, i.e. initiated by the server
Bidirectional connection - HTTP/2 spec - Streams and Multiplexing:

A "stream" is an independent, bidirectional sequence of frames exchanged between the client and server within an HTTP/2 connection.

The motivation behind HTTP/2 is explained here HTTP/2 FAQ:

HTTP/1.1 has served the Web well for more than fifteen years, but its age is starting to show.

and

The goal of the Working Group is that typical uses of HTTP/1.x can use HTTP/2 and see some benefit.

So HTTP/2 is nice and comes to replace HTTP/1.x. Unfortunately, HTTP/2 does not support WebSockets. In this question Does HTTP/2 make websockets obsolete? it is made clear that the HTTP/2 Server Push is not an alternative, neither are Server-Sent Events.

Now to the question: What do we use if we want WebSockts functionality over HTTP/2?

Answer

Well your timing is rather apt!

A new version of the internet standards draft was literally just published:

Additional information here:

And you can follow the discussion in it here:

Until this is approved, and then implemented by browsers and servers, I would say that Daniel Haxx’s post that you included in your question represents a very good summary of the current status.