Latest Version of NGINX Facilitates Real-Time Web Applications with WebSocket

NGINX, Inc., the high performance web company, today announced support for the WebSocket Protocol in the latest iteration of NGINX version 1.3. Available immediately, the functionality of the WebSocket Protocol is accessible within the core product. WebSocket provides exciting capabilities for web developers and service providers offering platforms as a service (PaaS), who are challenged by an ever increasing demand for high performance and low latency communications.

NGINX is wildly popular web server software, powering almost 30% of the world’s busiest sitesand 44% of the sites on Amazon’s AWS. Consequently, there is great demand to support WebSocket across the NGINX community. WebSocket proxy implementation allows users to extend and simplify the use of NGINX for the development and support of real-time web applications and platforms.

CloudBees and Apcera were the co-sponsors of this project.

“WebSocket provides functionality critical to future web and mobile application development. Instead of developing a proprietary, in-house solution, Apcera happily co-sponsored its development in a proven, rock-solid product like NGINX, which we’ll be fully supporting in our next-generation cloud platform,” said Derek Collison, CEO and Founder of Apcera.

“We are very pleased to partner with NGINX to provide WebSocket support for CloudBees customers,” said Sacha Labourey, CEO, CloudBees. “WebSocket opens up whole new user experiences and capabilities, but without first-class support from the web proxying layer, it’s mostly lived in demo-land. WebSocket support is now fully integrated into the CloudBees Platform, making it easily accessible for our real-world users. No APIs or integration issues – it just works.”

Support for WebSocket also reduces moving parts for web engineers, eliminates unnecessary work for developers and opens up new opportunities to run applications with live connections. For example, applications that handle real-time and dynamic data like stock prices and scores from sporting events will now be able to ensure that subscribers are promptly receiving the most accurate and up-to-date data. With support for WebSocket in NGINX developers will no longer need to implement complex workarounds on top of traditional HTTP communications.

“We’re pleased to offer support for the standardized WebSocket Protocol, and we are grateful to CloudBees and Apcera for sponsoring this work,” said Andrew Alexeev, co-founder of NGINX, Inc. “This provides our customer base with yet another essential tool to facilitate cost-efficient and scalable web architectures.”

WebSocket is a new data exchange mechanism, supported by all major browsers including Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox, and by a variety of application frameworks for Node.js, Java, .NET, Python and Ruby. In contrast to the previous methods of providing real-time responsiveness over HTTP, the WebSocket Protocol allows users to create fully dynamic channels between the client and the application, while greatly reducing latency and conserving bandwidth. WebSocket has already become an instrumental tool to create web applications for live content, instant communications, real-time games and more.

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About NGINX, Inc.

NGINX, Inc., the high performance web company, provides products, solutions and services for its renowned open source software, NGINX.

Run by the busiest websites on the Internet, NGINX enables companies to match increasing demand for faster web experience at scale, without incurring unnecessary costs in capital investments or time.

NGINX has become a key software component for many of the most innovative web architectures in the industry. Today NGINX serves almost 30 percent of the top 10,000 web sites, and 80 million of web sites overall, including millions of web sites in the cloud. Successful online services, transforming and shaping the future of Internet, such as Netflix, Pinterest, Airbnb, WordPress.com, Box, Instagram, GitHub, SoundCloud, Eventbrite, Zappos, use NGINX as part of their infrastructure.

For more information, please visit www.nginx.com