What is SPDY?
As most websites continuously get bigger and more complex, with more pages, higher quality photos and videos, and more interactivity, time to load the page increases as well. To ensure the transfer of information when webpages are completely loaded on any browser, HTTP and TCP required. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the system that ensures basic response/request semantics, while Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) guarantees safe and efficient delivery of data.
With the challenge of exchanging information online growing in difficulty due to the sizes of video and picture files, the SPDY protocol was developed by Google to aid in efficient data exchange, especially as websites continue to grow more robust. An application layer protocol for the web, SPDY was developed to address a number of challenges of web development.
Benefits of SPDY
- Making TCP, when its the underlying transport layer, compatible with existing networking infrastructure.
- Reducing the delay of signals travel time as well as processing time of information exchanged between sender and receiver.
- Reducing page loading time by up to 50%.
- Enabling servers to initiate connections with clients.
- Increasing security by utilizing SSL as the transport protocol.
As of 2015, the SPDY protocol is officially deprecated.