WebSockets are helping drive a new wave of richly interactive, real-time applications, but because many of the core tools used to scale most of today’s web apps don’t work with WebSockets, it’s required significant engineering effort to release WebSocket-based apps for large audiences in the real world. Because there wasn’t a good option for routing WebSockets connections, when the dotCloud team started seriously investigating how to make WebSockets available for our developer community over a year ago, we were forced to create our own. As a result, we’ve provided first-class WebSocket support for almost a year now.
Today we’re taking a step towards fixing this problem for developers everywhere by releasing Hipache, our WebSocket-supporting, real-world-ready HTTP proxy system as open source.
Hipache is a core part of the network routing infrastructure that keeps thousands of apps available on dotCloud: it handled every incoming HTTP connection. Building on the node-http-proxy library, Hipache provides:
- dynamic configuration
- declarative routing
- single, shared incoming port operation
- multi-process scalability
- back-end health checks with fail-over
and other features needed for a full proxy solution.
dotCloud was the first application deployment platform to make WebSockets publicly available, and we’re still one of the only ones to do so. We’re excited to see what the world can do with, and contribute to a proxy solution that treats WebSockets as a first-class citizen.
For more information, check out the project on GitHub today!
[...] Announcing Hipache, dotCloud’s Open Source, WebSocket … [...]