SPDY Review by Opera Software
Another dirty little secret is that WebSocket does not (yet) work over SPDY, despite the fact both protocols essentially originated in house at the same company.Both are effectively hacks on existing well established protocols, but both affecting different layers. With WebSocket, you cannot use your tried and tested HTTP parser. With SPDY, you cannot use your tried and tested SSL implementation. With a little bit of foresight, implementation of both might have involved use of only SSL Next Protocol Negotation (SPDY's approach) and a completely separate, orthogonal SPDY/WebSocket parser. This would also remove some of the more "innovative" features of WebSocket (Sec-WebSocket-Key and that magical fixed UUID).This is a testament to how heavily rushed both protocols were, and the kind of thing that could be avoided with a more strongly community lead process, which was missing at least in the early stages of WebSocket. I have no idea what it was like for SPDY, but given that the "innovative" header compression feature somehow survived, I'm guessing not good.