Google researchers have recently announced a new initiative called SPDY aimed at improving the performance of HTTP by reducing the delay between a HTTP request and a response. SPDY also allows to multiplex several requests over a single TCP connection. google intend to release a prototype implementation for a server and already has a chrome plugin.

The proposed protocol introduces several changes compared to HTTP 1.1 :

• a SPDY session is by default persistent
• the URL in the GET must contain the entire URL (host, port and path) and not only the path. The Host header line is not used anymore
• gzip is used by default to compress the request sent by the client (to deal with clients attached to links with low upstream bandwidth such as ADSL) and by the server
• the response is simplified as well
• SPDY includes a framing protocol that allows client and server to exchange structured data