SPDY is Google’s protocol that is intended to improve user experience on the web, by reducing the latency of web pages, sometimes up to a factor of 3. Yes, three times faster.

How does SPDY accomplish that ?

SPDY reduces roundtrips with the server, reduces the HTTP verboseness by compressing HTTP headers, improves the utilization of the TCP connection, multiplexes requests into a single TCP connection (instead of using a limited number of connections, each serving only one request), and allows for server to push secondary resources (like CSS, images, scripts, etc.) associated with a primary resource (typically a web page) without incurring in additional round-trips.

Now, the really cool thing is that Jetty has an implementation of SPDY (see the documentation) in the newly released 7.6.2 and 8.1.2 releases.
Your web applications can immediately and transparently benefit of many of the SPDY improvements without changes, because Jetty does the heavy lifting for you under the covers.

With Chromium/Chrome already supporting SPDY, and Firefox 11 supporting it also (although it needs to be enabled, see how here), more than 50% of the web browsers will be supporting it, so servers needs to catch up, and where Jetty shines.

The Jetty project continues to foster innovation by supporting emerging web protocols: first WebSocket and now SPDY.

A corollary project that came out from the SPDY implementation is a pure Java implementation of the Next Protocol Negotiation (NPN) TLS Extension, also available in Jetty 7.6.2 and 8.1.2.

To prove that this is no fluke, we have updated Webtide’s website with Jetty’s SPDY implementation, and now the website can be served via SPDY, if the browser supports it.

We encourage early adopters to test out Jetty’s SPDY and feedback us on jetty-dev@eclipse.org.

Enjoy !

SPDY support in Jetty

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