More HTTP/2 News

Just a short one today folks. I wanted to indicate some exciting stuff that’s happened in the past few hours, and get you excited for how the web is shaping up.

A few months ago I wrote a post about how iOS 9 was going to have HTTP/2 support, which you can find here. Since then, I started work on my new ambitious project: a pure-Python HTTP/2 stack that would work equally well as a client or a server. You can find this project on GitHub.

For the moment the project ships with a basic example server, written for Twisted. This server does nothing much: if you hit the base path, it echoes back a JSON dictionary of the headers from the request. Very simple.

Today, iOS 9 came out for real, and I decided I’d play around with it a bit. Using a custom version of Twisted containing a patch to enable ALPN, I made a few tiny changes to the Twisted example server to get it up and running with TLS and a self-signed certificate.

The result is below: a series of pictures of modern web browsers speaking HTTP/2 to a HTTP/2 server written entirely in Python. There’s no C extensions here: just Python. Along with each image is the list of settings that HTTP/2 client explicitly sends.

The next few months of work on hyper-h2 should be really interesting. Come help me out! In the meantime, if you want to try it out yourself, the code is available here: don’t forget to apply the Twisted patch!