Goodbye HTTP/1, welcome HTTP/2

The internet is about to shift to a new Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) bringing users greater speed, security and efficiency at no higher cost, according to its proponents. An expert in the field outlined told BR what the new technology means for both web users and professionals.

By Anda Sebesi

The Internet Engineering Task Force’s HTTP Working Group has completed its work on Hypertext Transfer Protocol 2, the successor to the HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 protocols that are the core of the World Wide Web. The working group has finished two closely related specifications, the HTTP/2 itself and HPACK, a specification for compressing HTTP/2 headers.

Work on HTTP/2 began in 2012 in response to the development of Google’s SPDY protocol. Google created SPDY to address a number of performance gripes that the company had with traditional HTTP. But how necessary is the transition to HTTP/2 now? Specialists say that HTTP/2 promises to bring big changes and improvements to how the internet operates.

“It is the most complex update of the HTTP protocol since ‘99. After such a long period of time standardized solutions for existing problems start to emerge,” said Vlad Paun (photo), CTO at atelieru.ro., a software company. By comparison, HTML5 was completed as standard in 2014 while its predecessor HTML 4 was standardized back in 1997. As in the case of HTML 5, the transition to HTTP/2 is not mandatory but it brings significant benefits for its users and especially for owners of sites with high traffic.”

Users complain that the current iteration, HTTP 1.1, is starting to show its age, especially now that web pages are more resource-intensive than before. As a result, HTTP/2 has been changed to make loading web pages faster. Paun says that the biggest new feature is something called multiplexing, intended to allow multiple HTTP requests to be delivered at the same time.

The CTO outlined some of the benefits that HTTP/2 will bring its users. “It is about speed. Without talking too many technical details, the new protocol allows for more efficient communication between the user (who uploads a web page) and the server (which transmits the content of the requested web page). At present the web browser can have between two and eight simultaneous connections to the server. These connections are used to receive images or information. HTTP/2 changes the rules and needs a single special connection,” commented Paun.

In his opinion the direct advantage is that it makes it possible to drop the other parallel connections which cost time and resources. “In other words, websites will be faster to access while servers will use fewer resources to transmit the same quantity of information,” said the atelieru.ro representative.

Commentators say that this new protocol means a new beginning and greater opportunity, which in the case of HTTP/2 is about security. “Although for HTTP/2 the use of an encryption mechanism for communication (TLS or https) is not mandatory, Firefox and Chrome have already announced that they will support HTTP/2 only on secured connections. Hence, they are trying to persuade web developers to use more secure methods to communicate information and make the internet a more secure environment,” said Paun.

He adds that the shift will take time. “We will not witness a complete transition that soon. The two standards will run in parallel for a long time yet. But we hope to be taking advantage of HTTP/2 next year,” said the CTO. He adds that his company has already started training sessions with its programmers and briefed its customers in order to prepare them for the new standard.

Speed and security will be the initial benefits for final users, Paun told BR, with 3G and 4G network users particularly noticing the greater speed. “In addition to these direct advantages, I am sure that new benefits that we’d never thought of will emerge. With a base of new communication rules, new mechanism can be built,” adds the CTO.

He says that the upgrade is not likely to inflate software companies’ staff or equipment costs. “Paradoxically, the costs should decrease as web developers can ‘produce’ more using the same equipment. In addition, payroll costs should remain stable as we assume there is a budget for increasing team members’ level of knowledge,” said Paun. “I am sure that those web developers who are passionate about their job and are the likely users of this new protocol will be eager to try it in the production environment and measure its performance.”

Box: The main benefits of HTTP/2

Multiplexing and concurrency: several requests can be sent in rapid succession on the same TCP connection, and responses can be received out of order – eliminating the need for multiple connections between client and server
Stream dependencies: the client can indicate to the server which of the resources are more important than others
Header compression: HTTP header size is drastically reduced
Server push: the server can send resources the client has not yet requested
No need to change websites or applications to ensure they continue to work properly.

Source: http2.akamai.com

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