HTTP2 protocol impact on web developement?

Question

I would like to bring your attention to something that I re-think for days. The new features and impact of HTTP/2 protocol for web development. I would also like to ask some related questions, because my annual planning is getting less accurate because of HTTP/2.

Since HTTP/2 uses a single, multiplexed connection, instead of multiple connections in HTTP 1.x domain sharding techniques will not be needed any more.

With HTTP/1.x you may have already put files in different domains to increase parallelism in file transfer to the web browser; content domain networks (CDNs) do this automatically. But it doesn't help – and can hurt – performance under HTTP/2.

Q1: Will HTTP/2 minimize the need for CDNs?

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Code files concatenating. Code chunks that would normally be maintained and transferred as separate files are combined into one. The browser then finds and runs the needed code within the concatenated file as needed.

Q2. Will HTTP/2 eliminate the need to concatenate files with similar extensions (css, javascript) and the usage of great Grunt and Gulp tools to do so?

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Q. Also, in order to simplify and keep the question more compact, I would ask quite generally what may be other impacts of HTTP/2 on web development as you can foresee?

Answer 1

Q1: Will HTTP/2 minimize to need for CDNs?

It will certainly shift the balance a bit, provided that you use the right software. I talk about balance because CDNs cost money and management time.

• If you are using CDNs to offload traffic you still will need them to offload traffic.

• If you are a smallish website (and most websites are, in numerical terms), you will have less of a reason to use a CDN, as latency can be hidden quite effectively with HTTP/2 (provided that you deploy it correctly). HTTP/2 is even better than SPDY, and check this article for a use case regarding SPDY.

• Also, most of the third-party content that we incorporate into our sites already uses CDNs.

Q2. Will HTTP/2 eliminate the need to concatenate files with similar extensions (css, javascript) and the usage of great Grunt and Gulp tools to do so?

Unfortunately not. Concatenating things won't be needed, unless the files you are delivering are extremely small, say a few hundred bytes. Everything else is still relevant, including minification and adding those ugly query strings for cache busting.

Q3 . Also, in order to simplify and keep the question more compact, I would ask quite general what may be other impacts of HTTP/2 on web development as you can foresee?

This is a tricky question. In one hand HTTP/2 arrives at a moment when the web is mature, and developers have whole stacks of things to take care of. HTTP/2 can be seen as a tiny piece to change in such a way that the entire stack doesn't crumble. Indeed, I can imagine many teams selling HTTP/2 to management this way ("It won't be a problem, we promise!").

But from a technical standpoint, HTTP/2 allows for better development workflows. For example, the multiplexing nature of HTTP/2 means that most of the contents of a site can be served over a single connection, allowing some servers to learn about interactions between assets by just observing browser behaviors. The information can be used together with other features of HTTP/2 and the modern web (specifically, HTTP/2 PUSH and the pre-open headers) to hide a lot of latency. Think about how much work that can save developers interested in performance.

Answer 2

Q1: Will HTTP/2 minimize to need for CDNs?

No. CDN's are primarily to co-locate content close to the user based on geographic location. Closer your are to the server, faster you will get the contet.

Q2. Will HTTP/2 eliminate the need to concatenate files with similar extensions (css, javascript) and the usage of great Grunt and Gulp tools to do so?

Concatenation is only a part of things a tool like is Grunt/Gulp does. Linting, conversions, runnings tests are other things you would still need a tool for. So they will stay. In terms of concat, you would ideally move away from creating a single large concat file per type and move to creating smaller concatenated files per module.

Q3. Also, in order to simplify and keep the question more compact, I would ask quite general what may be other impacts of HTTP/2 on web development as you can foresee?

General idea is HTTP/2 will not make a huge change to the way we develop things as its a protocol level change. Developers would ideally remove optimizations (like compacting, sharding) which are not optimization techniques with http/2