14 DAY TRIAL // There's no doubt Google is a speed junkie. It wants everything to be faster and its doing anything to make it so. It built its own web browser, Chrome, just for this, and it's even building a new operating system, Chrome OS, with the same idea in mind. It obsesses about its search engine to squeeze every last millisecond out of it. But it's still not enough. Therefore, it's now thinking about speeding up the web at the most basic of levels, by augmenting the underlying HTTP protocol with a brand new experimental technology dubbed SPDY.
SPDY is a very clever play on “speedy,” which is Google's subtle way of implying that the technology has something to do with speed or being fast. First of all, what exactly is SPDY? “SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression,” Mike Belshe and Roberto Peon, a couple of software engineers over at Google, explain. “We started working on SPDY while exploring ways to optimize the way browsers and servers communicate.”
The web as we know it today is based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a protocol developed way back the Web's dark ages in 1996, which now handles virtually all of the web traffic. It's done its job remarkably well so far, but Google thinks it can do better. It's not aiming to replace the protocol, which would be a daunting task even for Google, but rather improve it in a manner that doesn't require too many changes to the way web browsers or the servers which host the content work. SPDY will slot between the HTTP 'front-end' and the TCP which handles the communications at the lowest level.
Google has so far created the basic technologies and implemented them in a prototype web server and Chrome build to see how the whole system would work. The dev team has tested the technology only under lab conditions, the results being more than promising. Already the world's top 25 sites load up to 55 percent faster than using plain, vanilla HTTP. These results have been achieved in controlled conditions, but Google is opening up all the technology and documentations, in the hope that everyone will get involved and build on the existing code to make it ready for a real-world implementation.