ReadWriteEnterprise

Back in 2009, Google began an industry discussion about a prospective upgrade to HTTP protocol - the application that enables the Web over the Internet. The concept is called SPDY, and to date, conventional wisdom held that while some are skeptical of Google's motives, as a concept, SPDY was running unopposed.

Maybe not any more. This week, Microsoft is embarking on a curious strategy that sounds a lot like its old "embrace + extend" approach to world domination. Advancing just the introductory paragraphs of an IETF technical proposal that has yet to be released, Microsoft is calling for the next version of HTTP to include multiplexing for multiple components (like SPDY) and full-time encryption of the session layer (like SPDY, but without relying solely on SSL or TLS). The "extend" part comes by way of an allusion to WebSocket (which has recently been considered a part of HTML5) - a provision for full-duplex communications critical to the next generation of Web apps.

The nginx Web server and reverse proxy server has already posted impressive numbers in the Web server market as a small open source project. Now the project's creator, Igor Sysoev, is taking a run at turning nginx into a company. Will nginx shake things up?

Apache rules the roost when it comes to Web server market share, no doubt. But nginx is coming up fast. For those not familiar, nginx is a high performance Web server and reverse proxy server. It got its start as a project for Russian search engine Rambler (where Sysoev was previously employed), with an initial release in 2004.