It is no exaggeration to say that the World Wide Web has now become the universal computing platform, used for every form of data-driven interaction between humans, humans and machines and between machines.

These diverse interactions are based on a few key communication paradigms and protocols, honed and adapted over the past forty years to their current state as the common substrate which powers the entire Web.

This White Paper provides an overview of these paradigms and key protocols. It collects many topics we have touched on in various PubNub blogs into a comprehensive story.