I'm building a chat application with a custom web socket controller and I want to establish a two way communication between different clients with the server in the middle in such a way that whenever a client sends a request, it gets updated on the server and the server emits a response to all the clients.
Note: I've tried using IHP's Auto Refresh but using that is turning out to be quite expensive for my use case so that's why I'm trying to set up a custom web socket controller.
Check out the new IHP DataSync API: https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/Guide/realtime-spas.html
It's higher level than websockets but likely can help you implement the chat app.
Related
I started to implement a HTTP ping health monitor as a private project with React and Node.js. I thought about making monitor with intervals that will send an axios request to server to receive all the urls and will return the results to server which will be shown later on in the client side.
I don't wanna use REST API to transfer data between the monitor and the server and to show it lively in the client side.
MONITOR <--> SERVER <--> CLIENT
What should I use instead of REST API in order to communicate between the monitor and the server? I know socket.io is fine to communicate between the client and the server but it is not so good for scaling.
What will be good and fast to transfer data for this specific project and not so hard to implement?
Thanks!
You can work with Server Sent Events in NodeJS, that is a way of receiving events from the server. Then you can use EventSource to open a connection to the server to begin receiving events from it.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Server-sent_events/Using_server-sent_events
Take a look at this tutorial from DigitalOcean:
How To Use Server-Sent Events in Node.js to Build a Realtime App
Also take a look at Socket.io:
https://socket.io/
I currently have a socket.io server spawned by a nodeJS web API server.
The UI runs separately and connects to the API via web socket. This is mostly used for notifications and connectivity status checks.
However the API also acts as a gateway for several micro services. One of these is responsible for computing the data necessary for the UI to render some charts. This operation is long-lasting and due to many reasons the computation will only start when a request is received.
In a nutshell, the UI sends a REST request to the API and the API currently uses gRPC to send the request to the micro service. This is bad because it locks both API and UI.
To avoid locking the socket server on the API should be be able to relay the UI request and the "computation ended" event received by the micro service, this way nothing would be locked. This could eventually lead to the gRPC server on the micro service to be removed.
Is this something achievable with socket.io?
If not is the only way for the API to spawn a secondary socket connection to the micro service for each one received by the UI?
Is this a bad idea?
I hope this is clear, thanks.
I actually ended up not using socket.io. However this can still be done with it if the API spawns a server and has the different services connected as clients, https://socket.io/docs/rooms-and-namespaces/ can be used.
This way messages can be "relayed" and even broadcasted from the server to both in case something happens.
I'm working on a prototype application using Socket.io and having some trouble understanding the best approach to categorizing sockets.
My application serves multiple customers and has two types of clients:
Agent client running Socket.io client using Node.js
Web browser client running Socket.io client in the browser
How can my Socket.io server identify that a particular socket belongs to an agent of customer A versus an agent of customer B versus a web browser for customer C?
I read about namespaces and rooms but still a bit confused.
If identification doesn't require security, simply let clients send a special event indicating what type of agent/browser they're, upon connection. On the server-side, when that event is received, set the identifier into the respective socket object.
If identification require security, you can grab the user session via https://github.com/oskosk/express-socket.io-session.
I need to create 20 clients which make requests simultaneously to a server in nodejs using websocket. I am able to create the connection between a single server and a client using websocket. But when it comes to creating 20 clients, I am not having any idea to proceed. Please give any suggestions to proceed.
You wouldn't need to create 20 html pages. Same HTML page can be loaded by multiple clients.
On server-side, the 'request' event will fire every time a client connects to your websocket server. Your websocket server will be able to handle multiple clients out of the box. However, you will need to ascertain 'which' client this particular request originated from. That can be done by using tokens or credentials, or any other custom protocol that you want to establish between your client and server.
Check the server-side usage example for websocket module here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/websocket#server-example
I am building an app in which I provide functionality X, Y and chat.
Lets say that X and Y are non-interactive eg. reading articles - which will work fine with REST (on a node.js server) while chat is obviously interactive so it will work best with socket.io!
Questions: 1. Is it possible for me to 'switch on' a socket between the server and the user when the user navigates to the chat part of the application? 2. Can I open up a socket inside a GET request for the url: example.com/chats/usr_id on the node.js server?
3. How can this be accomplished inside a Backbone routing framework?
Yes. Just initialize the connection when the view is rendered (via a controller or script). See socket.io client documentation. You can just connect when the view is rendered and disconnect when the view is terminated. http://socket.io/docs/client-api/
You cannot open sockets with a GET request. Socket.io has it's own build in mechanisms for connecting to a socket server. It will start with Web Socket protocol and fall back to Long Polling. You can however use custom url's for unique things. One again, consult the socket.io documentation: http://socket.io/docs/client-api/
http://www.sitepoint.com/chat-application-using-socket-io/
p.s. I'd suggest reading up on how Web Sockets work, as you don't seem to have a very strong understanding.