Announcing SPDY draft 2 implementation in nginx

This is a big deal, I think. Ten years from now we're going to look back and discover that Google quietly replaced HTTP without anybody complaining, or even noticing.

The other article on SPDY complained about it having SSL enabled by default. Is that really something to complain about? Isn't it one of the good things about it, because if SPDY gets adopted, it means everything becomes encrypted? And isn't that a very desirable future?

Wait. Did I just read that right? They want to emulate a packet (or frame) based protocol on top of a stream protocol (TCP-Stream) which itself uses packets? That adds umm... how many overhead? Lets count:<p>- Data Link Layer (for instance Ethernet-Frames/Packets)<p>- IPv4/IPv6 - Packets<p>- TCP-Packets --&#62; TCP-Stream<p>- SPDY-Frames --&#62; Multiple Streams<p>- (<i>Edit</i> OK. Maybe not HTTP. Just insert here how they want to transmit the headers)<p>That way we not only send more useless data. We also have to dis- and reassemble everything twice.<p>Why not just extend the TCP-Protocol to support multiple streams? There's still unused space in the header and we have the possibility add additional options.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#TCP_segment_structure" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#T...</a><p>Am I missing something? I know that applications are not allowed to send raw TCP-Packets on most OSes by default. But most servers run Linux, which could be easily patched to support such additional features. (And webhosts will have some work to support that new protocol anyways)<p>I don't get it.<p>Edit: SCTP may be a suitable replacement for TCP as mentioned in some other comment. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Pro...</a>

For everyone who tries to build this: the URL to the patch file is <a href="http://nginx.org/patches/spdy/patch.spdy-35.txt" rel="nofollow">http://nginx.org/patches/spdy/patch.spdy-35.txt</a>, and not the one mentioned in the announcement.

I hope SCTP[1] starts to take off soon as a transport for protocols like this, so they don't have to keep working around the limitations of TCP.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCTP" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCTP</a>

It was much easier to get this working than I thought it would be! Does anyone know when this will be part of an official release?