HTTP 2.0 started with the SPDY spec and has been smoothed and refined during the IETF process, so yeah, it is planned to completely replace SPDY.

"Smoothed and refined" by the IETF?

What are you seeking to clarify? Hard to tell if you are inquiring as to how that happened, quibbling with the word choices, or disagreeing completely.

Looks to me that it was an expression of 'quizzical sarcasm' in the form of a question.

I should probably have explained further, but there is a certain amount of irony in that statement.

See [email protected] for more details: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/maillist.h...

The actual current of things is that HTTP 2.0 is what we want in the end, and SPDY is a toy to see what could be cool to add. When something that was tested with SPDY looks right, it is moved to the HTTP2 spec. I think the long-term goal is to deprecate SPDY in favor of HTTP2.

This way of development is very interesting because it enables not only to change rapidly, but also to try completely new things on a different "namespace" (ie without polluting the whole HTTP stacke already deployed)

The complexity is not horrible as far as communications protocols go.

Anyone know what working implementations exist currently?

Ideally, it'd be nice to see actual real world data showing the benefits over http 1.1.

There's a C++ implementation here, but I'm not sure how complete it is: https://github.com/http2d/core

I think nginx and Chrome support SPDY which HTTP 2.0 was based on, so that performance should be able to be tested and be fairly representative of what we can expect.

But that's the thing...it's _not_ a communication's protocol. It's a transfer protocol...

To-may-to, to-mah-to..

No, because a communication protocol has to handle all the types of problems HTTP and TCP solve. A transfer protocol is concerned with moving data and meta data, not the problems TCP solves.

Yes, and about time too.