HTTP/2: A jump-start for Java developers

HTTP/2 was approved in February 2015 as the successor to the original web communication protocol. While it is in the last stages of finalization, the standard has already been implemented by early adopters such as Jetty and Netty, and will be incorporated into Servlet 4.0. Find out how HTTP/2 renovates HTTP's text-based protocol for better latency, then see techniques like server push, streaming, multiplexing, and header compression implemented in a client-server example using Jetty.

High-speed browser networking

In the early days of the World Wide Web, Internet connection bandwidth was the most important limiting factor for a faster browsing experience. That has changed in the years since, and these days many consumers use broadband technologies for Internet access. As of 2014, Akamai's State of the Internet report showed that the average connection speed for customers in the United States exceeded 11 Mbit/s.
As Internet connection speeds have increased, the importance of latency to web application performance has become more apparent. When the web was new, the delay in sending a request and waiting for a response was much less than the total time to download all of the response data, but today that is no longer the case. "High bandwidth equals high speed" is no longer a valid maxim, but that doesn't mean we can ignore the importance of bandwidth. For use cases that require bulk data transfer such as video streaming or large downloads, bandwidth is still a roadblock. In contrast to web pages, these types of content use long-running connections, which stream a constant flow of data. Such use cases are bandwidth bound in general.

Read the entire article here: http://www.javaworld.com/article/2916548/java-web-development/http-2-for-java-developers.html