Communicating and Displaying Real-Time Data with Web Socket

Internet communication provides a convenient, hyperlinked, stateless exchange of information, but can be problematic when real-time data exchange is needed. The Web Socket protocol reduces Internet communication overhead and provides efficient, stateful communication between Web servers and clients. To determine whether Web Socket 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 Web Socket connection. Here, they compare the Web Socket protocol latency to HTTP polling and long polling.