Twitter releases SPDY library for iOS and OS X | Hacker News Reader

Twitter releases SPDY library for iOS and OS X

github.com

114 pointsrobert-boehnke17 comments

I like the way Twitter gets something done in improving the internet using an open source library. For instance, Bootstrap is all over and did encourage a lot in pushing responsive/mobile websites.

Its a lot better than having your tab page hijacked to show a google search box like in Google chrome a closed box from an open source project - webkit. I hope twitter stays this way 5-10 years from now.

You are aware that SPDY was developed by Google, right?

Its also not that widely adopted which is the problem its a great protocol I think. When Google pushes something it doesn't always work so well, besides android, there was also WebM and its picture counterpart which aren't well adopted.

What I mean by this is If I as a developer want to use it in my project its not all that easy. Big sites adopt it but I wish more of the internet would & it would easy to build APIs on it too.

Before bootstrap a whole lot of sites worked on mobile but because of Twitter a significant chunk of new sites became responsive and mobile.

Google uses it for nearly everything. Facebook supports SPDY. Twitter supports SPDY. All CloudFlare sites support SPDY. nginx supports it.

It's becoming more widely deployed on the large Internet sites that have the capability and engineering resources to make it happen. If you want to deploy it on your own site then nginx makes it easy.

Yes you are right most of the big sites use spdy. The issue I meant to speak of was Its not that easy to use in the 'immediate' type of way.

If I wanted to build a site running on SPDY and have a client side app to communicate to the server its not fully covered.

Nginx wouldn't help to fully enjoy full of the benefits of SPDY because it would just be a transparent proxy back towards http.

For instance I want to connect to my meteor app over DDP using SPDY but Its not possible to do that yet.

When twitter does something like this they try and solve a legitimate issue without having much of an agenda that belongs only to itself. We all could use this.

I agree. Google does great engineering, but their "developer-as-an-end-user" to their engineering really suffers. Take a look at Android documentation vs. iOS documentation if you want an example. I really wish Google would hire some great engineers who actually LOVE technical writing and understand developer experience to create their APIs.

> nginx supports it

Well, one hopes. nginx is still on SPDY/2 which browser vendors are already preparing to remove support for ...

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/spdy-dev/XDudMZSq3e4

So hooray for more up to date implementations!

The "picture counterpart" of WebM is called WebP, and it gets about 30% savings over jpeg. While you can't serve it to everyone until all browsers support it, if you'd like to convert images to WebP and serve them only to supporting browsers you could use mod_pagespeed: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module

(Disclaimer: I work on mod_pagespeed and ngx_pagespeed at Google.)

You are aware this implementation was developed by Twitter, right?

Was Bootstrap actually born from Twitter internal code or did Twitter engineers build it in their spare time?

It was born from an Twitter internal toolkit called Blueprint:

https://dev.twitter.com/blog/bootstrap-twitter https://blog.twitter.com/2013/bootstrap-30

I added a pod for it, if anyone is interested. Also hoping I didn't do something bad. I set the license and contacts as from what I could find for the other libraries.

But I suspect I might have have too high of versions set for the libraries. iOS 7 and OSX 1.9. Let me know if that should be changed :)

I'm quite pleased that they did it properly by going through the NSURLProtocols so any library that is an abstraction of those will benefit from this.

EDIT: I also rewrote their tests for XCTest, just for kicks and replaced their project with a workspace that used the pod locally. I'm sick and bored :& - my version of eating ice cream and being in bed (which I am)

People like you are the reason I love the internet.

Thanks for the pull requests!

A naive question: if multiplexing of SPDY is so important to load speed, why not promote SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) instead of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol)?

EDIT: It was reported that SPDY over SCTP was faster than SPDY over TCP. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2012AprJun/...

So much existing infrastructure only supports TCP and UDP that a new protocol at that level is pretty much a non-starter. UDP is lightweight enough that you can put SCTP on top of UDP, but at that point you might as well make something optimized for that use case, which is why Google is working on QUIC.

This is exactly the case. It is an explicit goal of the SPDY and HTTP/2 projects to be something that can actually be deployed on the current internet.

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