Would like to implement WebSocket support

[André Caron]

  Hi all!

I've implemented the WebSocket wire protocol as an incremental parser, making it
suitable for use in high-end asynchronous servers such as NGINX.  The code is
open source (BSD-licenced) and available on GitHub[1].  I plan on using it to
tunnel other protocols (svn and git, in particular) over HTTP.  I have a nice
setup that works well on the client side, but I'd like to integrate this with my
existing NGINX stack with includes virtual hosting and a bunch of other stuff (I
can't use another server directly unless I use a non-default port).

To the best of my understanding, NGINX has no support for WebSockets.  The HTTP
proxy module does not support HTTP 1.1 and WebSockets are incompatible with both
SCGI and FastCGI because of the "Content-Length" problem (it is assumed to be 0
if unspecified).

I'd like to implement an NGINX module that specifically handles WebSockets so
that I can integrate my tunnel in my NGINX setup. I have absolutely no
experience with the NGINX source code, but  I've found a nice guide on writing
NGINX modules[2].  After initial reading, I understand that I need to write an
Upstream (proxy) handler.  Is this correct?

The HTTP proxy module has a scary note that says:

> Note that when using the HTTP Proxy Module (or even when using FastCGI), the
  entire client request will be buffered in nginx before being passed on to the
  backend proxied servers.

Is this a limitation cause by NGINX's architecture, or is this by design
(e.g. for validation of body against headers, etc.)?

The bigger problem, however, is that there is no standard interface to
application servers for this new WebSocket protocol.  There is some
discussion[3] on an Apache enhancement request that basically proposes a
modification of CGI.  Since CGI has already been demonstrated to be a
performance problem, I'm looking for an alternate solution, maybe something
closer to SCGI?  Anyone have suggestions?

Thanks, André

[1]: https://github.com/AndreLouisCaron/cwebs
[2]: http://www.evanmiller.org/nginx-modules-guide.html [3]:
https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=47485#c13