Re:The Need for Web UDP
by edwhitesell on Thursday July 27, 2017 @02:59PM
(#14868301)
I think we're on the same page. My point was I think it's too complicated to do all of those steps (and likely more) just to "switch" to UDP. You could instead make all of that part of the Web UDP application, which is no less complicated, but then you are removing one step of switching applications/protocols midway through.
I guess what I'm trying to say is UDP could work, but I think trying to bootstrap the initial connection/session info with HTTP is probably going to be FAR more trouble than it's worth.
And once you have that permission, you never need to make an HTTPS connection again.
What you do care is that your actual application traffic, such as your login session, and your UDP traffic have some way of being associated with each other, but you have that problem regardless of how the client (whether it's a browser client or a normal desktop/mobile app) gets permission to send UDP.
As an example, the user could visit example.com, load some HTML and JS, send a request to login.example.com, get a session key, send a single HTTPS request to data.example.com exactly once, and then send UDP to data.example.com protected by that session key. You never send HTTPS to data.example.com again; from this point onwards you only send UDP. Coordination between your HTTPS login server and your UDP data server is no different in this model from the native app model.