Peer-to-Peer Networking

We haven’t seen the end of advanced networking in web applications either. With both HTTP and WebSocket, there is a client (the browser or other user agent) and a server (the host of the URL). Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking allows clients to communicate directly. This is often more efficient than sending all data through a
server. Efficiency, of course, reduces hosting costs and improves application performance.

 P2P should make for faster multiplayer games and collaboration software.

Another immediate application for P2P combined with the device element is efficient video chat in HTML 5. In peer-to-peer video chat, conversation partners would be able to send data directly to each other without routing through a central server. Outside of HTML5, P2P video chat has been wildly popular in applications like Skype. Because of the high bandwidth required by streaming video, it is likely that neither of those applications would have been possible without peer-to-peer communication.

Browser vendors are already experimenting with P2P networking, such as Opera’s Unite technology, which hosts a simplified web server directly in the browser. Opera Unite lets users create and expose services to their peers for chatting, file sharing, and document collaboration.

Of course, P2P networking for the web will require a protocol that takes security and network intermediaries into consideration as well as an API for developers to program against.