My-Channels, a provider of unified enterprise, web and mobile middleware, today announced support for the HTML5 WebSocket protocol in their Nirvana Enterprise Server and the Nirvana JavaScript client API.

My-Channels' Nirvana API for JavaScript has been updated to include underlying support for Web Sockets, an HTML5 technology for full-duplex communication between web browsers and servers. The Nirvana JavaScript API will now use WebSocket communication by default. Browsers yet to adopt this new standard will continue to function using Nirvana's Comet-based streaming implementation.

"The benefit of Web Sockets over traditional Comet techniques is primarily reduced overhead", said Tam Freestone-Bayes, VP Internet Engineering at my-Channels. "We feel the WebSocket protocol offers genuine benefits over the current "hand-rolled" JavaScript solutions, and have accordingly chosen to add WebSocket support to our Nirvana Realm Server and associated Nirvana JavaScript Client API".

The Nirvana JavaScript API provides comprehensive middleware functionality on top of the inherently simple WebSocket protocol. The API delivers essential features and robustness that remain absent from the underlying standard, such as support for idle connections, connection recovery and multiplexing.

Nirvana developers can now transparently upgrade existing Nirvana JavaScript RIAs to employ Web Sockets and gain transport efficiency improvements via a routine redeployment, and without changing any application code.

Nirvana Enterprise Server and the Nirvana JavaScript API are available for download from the my-Channels web site.