Erlang SPDY
This is a library application designed to make it easy to add SPDY support to other erlang apps, specifically webservers like cowboy, misultin and mochiweb.
This app does contain a basic demo server which just returns a "Hello World" response to a GET / request received over SPDY. You should really use an existing server, or at least a more robust tcp listener/acceptor method.
To run the demo server:
$ rebar compile # compile everything
$ erl -pa ebin/ -boot start_sasl -s espdy # espdy app doesn't run anything
erl> espdy_demo_server:start(6121, false). # start server, non-SSL (SPDY/2 only), OR
erl> espdy_demo_server_ssl:start(6121). # start server, SSL (SPDY/3 and SPDY/2)
Please note that you should be running Erlang OTP R16B or later, as that was the first release that included the TLS Next Protocol Negotiation (NPN) functionality.
Current Status
The SSL demo server serves up a hardcoded page, and advertises NPN support for SPDY/3 and SPDY/2. It can serve either of these versions to Chrome or another compatible SPDY client.
The non-SSL demo server serves up the same hardcoded page, but only supports SPDY v2 sessions at the moment. This is because a bug in Chrome causes it to only use SPDY/2 in non-SSL mode.
There is no flow control, although that got pushed into SPDY/3 anyway.
Probably some other stuff to mention here.
Testing SPDY with Chrome
Run Chrome with these flags:
# Non-SSL mode
--use-spdy=no-ssl --new-window --user-data-dir=/tmp/foo
# Or, with NPN/SSL:
--use-spdy=ssl --new-window --user-data-dir=/tmp/foo
This will open a new Chrome window:
- with a new chrome profile, ignoring your existing settings
- in SPDY-only mode - sites using normal HTTP will not load
- force SPDY to not use SSL, for simpler testing (if you've opted for
no-ssl)
Now go to http://localhost:6121/ in the new Chrome window.
You can view stats on Chrome's SPDY status at chrome://net-internals/#spdy However, it crashes with --use-spdy=no-ssl unless you have a very recent version. I'm testing with stunnel and https, and it works fine when Chrome is started with --use-spdy=ssl
OS X example
/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --use-spdy=no-ssl --new-window --user-data-dir=/tmp/foo http://localhost:6121/
Linux example
chromium-browser --use-spdy=no-ssl --new-window --user-data-dir=/tmp/foo http://localhost:6121/
Erlang SPDY Design Notes
This library is useful once you have accepted a socket that will be used for
the SPDY protocol. Once accepted, you start a espdy_session process,
providing a callback module. (See the demo server).
espdy_session will spawn a espdy_stream process for each new stream.
espdy_stream uses the callback module to respond to SPDY requests.
Two zlib contexts are maintained for each session. For inflating and deflating.
espdy_parser takes care of all the binary-to-record work and visa-versa, and
requires a compression context to use.
As with other SPDY implementations, the server does not allow frames with different SPDY versions to be sent on the same session. The server will terminate the stream or session with the appropriate error message if a frame version mismatch is encountered.
Tests
EUnit tests are provided to verify the correct behavior of all binary encoding and decoding. However, there are not yet any tests for the session or stream management logic.
SPDY Resources
Chrome supports SPDY v2 and v3 specs currently: