I make no apologies for banging on about the Internet of Things.. again.. but in the context of HTML5 WebSocket this talk is awesome.
Kaazing are based in San Francisco and use HTML5 WebSocket to provide instant two way communications over the web ‘at an enterprise level’.
Peter Moskovits is the Head of Real-Time Solutions and in this presentation he gives demos on the capabilities of WebSocket, talks about what WebSocket is and gives a projection of where things are going with HTML5 for Real-Time web and Internet of Things.
This video is laced with examples of what you can do with WebSocket, a communication layer for bi-directional interaction over the web. The first quick demos are –
- a cooperation scenario moving objects around on a laptop and iPad simultaneously (go to 2:20),
- a foreign exchange platform demo where data flow is increased to 50 updates per second and then 100 (go to 4:10)
- a companion app to live televised sports games for real-time interactions such as betting and voting (go to 5:46)
- and the fourth one is sending tilt events from a smartphone to control a formula 1 car on a separate screen in real-time (go to 7:35)
These all demonstrated the extreme low millisecond latency connectivity over the public web which WebSocket offers and as if these demos were not proof enough Moskovits mentioned later on in the talk that a NASCAR* simulation for a companion app displayed information from a race 8 seconds faster than live TV pictures were received (go to 1:00:14)
After these demos, Moskovits drills down into the technology and what WebSocket is (go to 10:03) starting out with housekeeping – the ratification of it’s two standards, the protocol documentation by IETF as well as it’s first API standard controlled by W3C and then explains data flow and how WebSockets actually works (go to 13:45).
The most useful practical application and my favourite part of this talk is the reference to missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 (go to 49:00) where Kaazing applied WebSocket to capture telemetry from an airline’s blackbox in real-time over the web for the use of the authorities, air traffic control and so on. Kaazing used a quad copter for the experiment in California to mimic an airline which sent data via a satellite to British satellite company Inmarsat in London with such low latency that Moskovit says even for the worlds slowest internet connections in remote locations, ‘live’ black box information can be received in less than a second!
One last thing is the JavaScript API, which is straightforward (go to 21:25) requiring a constructor and URL for the WebSocket allowing you then to register the event listeners and Moskovits runs through very simple listeners and methods to set up instructions.
*Moskovits does not mention NASCAR but for the sake of this article, let’s call it NASCAR
