

The following StackOverflow has a list of such browsers: What browsers support HTML5 WebSockets API? ( ). There's no need to use any special libraries to use WebSocket in modern browsers. For more information on WebSocket, take a look at the extensive resource About HTML5 WebSocket ( ). This main factor makes WebSocket ideal for real-time apps for which data needs to be available on the client immediately. WebSocket's connection is constant, in contrast to traditional HTTP requests, which are always initiated by the client, which means there's no way for a server to notify the client if there are updates (except for Server-side Events).īy maintaining a duplex open connection between the client and the server, updates can be pushed in a timely fashion without clients needing to poll at certain intervals. WebSocket is a special communication “channel” between browsers (clients) and servers. Native WebSocket and Node.js with the ws module exampleĬollaborative online editor example with DerbyJS, Express.js, and MongoDB To get you started with WebSocket and Node.js, we'll keep things simple stupid (KISS) ( ) and cover the following: Thus, Node is very well suited for the task of being a back-end pair to the browser with its WebSocket API. Implementing WebSocket servers with Node is pure joy because Node is fast and because Node is also JavaScript, just like the WebSocket clients (i.e., browser JavaScript). And as you know, Node.js is a highly efficient, non-blocking input/output platform. Hence, developers need a special ws server. The WebSocket protocol (or ws:// in the URL format) is very different from HTTP or HTTPS. This object is a class and it has all kinds of methods for developers to implement the WebSocket protocol client. The way it works: in browser JavaScript you get a global object called WebSocket. HTML5 pioneered the new standard of real-time connections called WebSocket. They allow for a greater bandwidth to transmit data and for more calculations to process and retrieve the data. The main factor contributing to this trend is that technologies have become much better. Real-time apps are becoming more and more widespread in financial trading, gaming, social media, various DevOps tools, cloud services, and of course, news. Chapter 9 Real-Time Apps with WebSocket, Socket.IO, and DerbyJS
