Socket.IO: sockets for the rest of us

Over at LearnBoost, I just released Socket.IO, a normalized Socket API that hides the complexity of the realtime transports.

With code as simple as this:

socket = new io.Socket('localhost');
socket.connect();
socket.send('some data');
socket.addEvent('message', function(data){
    alert('got some data' + data);
});

you’ll be leveraging:

WebSocket
Adobe Flash Socket
ActiveX HTMLFile (IE)
Server-Sent Events (Opera)
XHR with multipart encoding
XHR with long-polling

And on the server side, things are equally simple. This is a chat application written in Socket.IO-node, the Node.JS backend implementation:

var buffer = [], json = JSON.stringify;

io.listen(server, {

	onClientConnect: function(client){
		client.send(json({ buffer: buffer }));
		client.broadcast(json({ announcement: client.sessionId + ' connected' }));
	},

	onClientDisconnect: function(client){
		client.broadcast(json({ announcement: client.sessionId + ' disconnected' }));
	},

	onClientMessage: function(message, client){
		var msg = { message: [client.sessionId, message] };
		buffer.push(msg);
		if (buffer.length > 15) buffer.shift();
		client.broadcast(json(msg));
	}

});

As usual, head to GitHub to experiment with the code.

13 Comments

davetiye said

thank you wery much

Reinhardt said

Why do you use RosePad instead of LearnBoost? It seems RosePad does not exist at Github. It also causes trouble when you update submodules. Any suggestions would be great!