CloudBees is First Java PaaS Vendor to Offer Support for WebSocket Standard

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CloudBees, Inc., the Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) innovation leader, today announced that the company has collaborated with NGINX to provide support for the new WebSocket web standard. Access to WebSocket allows developers working on the CloudBees PaaS to deliver standards-based rich, interactive web and mobile applications optimized for fast performance running on the massively scalable CloudBees platform.

Developers consider the WebSocket protocol groundbreaking. It is a significant advance for the development of highly interactive web applications that use a long-lived connection between a browser and a website. Such applications include gaming, stock quotes, news reports, ticket sales, medical device applications and other applications requiring high degrees of interactivity between browser and web server. WebSocket is such a breakthrough technology because it is the first standard to support real-time, bidirectional communication over TCP.

The integration is initially available in limited production form. To provide its customers early access to WebSocket, CloudBees supported NGINX in its efforts to deliver and harden WebSocket on the fast-growing, high-performance NGINX web server. The partnership establishes CloudBees as the first production PaaS vendor to support WebSocket using NGINX.

NGINX currently has over 80 million domains worldwide, including almost 30 percent of the 10,000 most active websites in the world. Typical NGINX customers are service providers, media and entertainment companies, online retailers and social media sites. Fast performance is critical for these organizations.

"We use NGINX at CloudBees. There are several reasons why it has become so popular - it's incredibly fast and reliable, and it scales like crazy," said Steven G. Harris, senior vice president of products, CloudBees. "Now there's an additional reason: NGINX supports WebSocket. We're very glad to be able to offer the power of WebSocket to CloudBees customers at the same time that NGINX makes it available to their customers. In fact, CloudBees has already done the integration, so you get access today to WebSocket running and scaling out on your favorite stack - no waiting for your old middleware vendor to figure it out."

According to the February 2013 Netcraft Web Server survey, NGINX is the fastest-growing web server on the market over the past five years. Thanks to this phenomenal growth, NGINX now holds more market share and supports more active web sites than any other web server, except for Apache.

"Our customers have been anxiously awaiting our support for WebSocket, so we really appreciate CloudBees stepping up to help us bring it into early production," said Andrew Alexeev, co-founder of NGINX. "CloudBees has always been on the cutting edge of innovation in the PaaS space, and we are happy to support the company's efforts to offer WebSocket to developers on its platform."

In addition to CloudBees, the NGINX WebSocket project was also supported by Apcera.

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