Using the Communication API and Web Sockets

Abstract

So far in this book, you’ve learned about HTML5 features that require no server-side communication. Although you used some techniques such as jQuery $.ajax() to send and receive data between the client and the server, doing so wasn’t an integral part of the HTML5 feature being discussed. In this chapter, however, you learn about a few HTML5 features that are specifically designed to facilitate communication between the client browser and the server. Using these features, you can pass data to and from web pages from the same web application or from different applications. Additionally, some of these techniques provide one-way (client to server) communication, and others provide two-way (client to server and server to client) communication. Specifically, you learn about the following:

• Cross-document messaging and Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)

• Using the postMessage API to send data to documents from different web application

• Using the new XMLHttpRequest Level 2 features to make GET and POST requests

• Notifying the client using server-sent events

• Performing two-way communication using Web Sockets