WebSockets is the way forward
One of the great frustrations of developing any Web based software system is the request driven paradigm that the HTTP protocol demands. The user sends a request and the server responds, based on some further user interaction further requests are sent and responded to. There are clever ways of circumventing this behaviour, but they have all been rather messy. One big problem is that a request is generated on the client side either in HTML code or in some Javascript and then handed off to a handler on the server, there maybe many such handlers for different types of request. The response is then handled on the client side somewhere. It all get`s rather messy keeping track of where the request responses are handled and maintaining state. It reminds me of the bad old days of BASIC, where the GOTO command caused execution of the program to jump around. As code grew in complexity it became very difficult to track or debug. Developers were always discouraged from using GOTO unless ab...