Communicating and Displaying Real-Time Data with WebSocket

Internet communication provides a convenient, hyperlinked, stateless exchange of information, but can be problematic when real-time data exchange is needed. The WebSocket protocol reduces Internet communication overhead and provides efficient, stateful communication between Web servers and clients. To determine whether WebSocket communication is faster than HTTP polling, the authors built a Web application to measure the one-way transmission latency of sending real-time wind sensor data at a rate of 4 Hz. They implemented a Jetty servlet to upgrade an HTTP connection to a WebSocket connection. Here, they compare the WebSocket protocol latency to HTTP polling and long polling.