WebGL and WebSocket

Additional Web Technologies

WebGL: OpenGL (graphics language) in the browser

                 provides high performace graphics

WebSocket: asynchrounous, bidirectional, fullduplex communication channel between the browser and web server

                         provides generic communication

WebGL

HTML5 provides the Canvas object and a graphics API for rendering imges and primitives.

    simple to use but relatively new

    low performance

WebGL provides an OpenGL window object via Canvas and uses the OpenGL API

    hard to use but API is well known, prior experience with OpenGL is a big benefit

    high performance; can use GPU 

All accessed via JavaScript, though some embedded code such as shader code may be needed.

WebGL libraries such as three.js might alleviate the pain.

Browser compatibility

Compatible (perhaps at an experimental stage) with most browsers and continuing to gain support.

    Check compatibility

Old GPU drivers may be blocked for security purposes

Browsers may fall back to a non-accelerate engine, or to use of Canvas 2D or DOM-based rendering.

Web Socket

provides reduction in network traffic and latency by avoiding polling

uses a different protocol to HTTP

    ws://

    but backwards compatible with HTTP- a websocket starts as a http connection

WebSocket differs from TCP in that it provides for a stream of messages instead of a stream of bytes.