I have a REST server to handle communication between my database server and Android/iOS devices, the REST server is also able to send push messages via Firebase. My second server is a UDP server, that receive and send messages to a IOT device, both server are written in Node.js and running on different EC2 instances.
Then my UDP server receive a message from the IOT device, lets say some GPS data. Is there a good way to call some methods from my REST server via the UDP server? Or send the data to it ? Are there any ways that the two server can communicate with each other ?
You could implement a separate API on your REST server that would be called from your UDP server.
Interprocess communication is a wide topic, there are plenty of ways to do it, it all depends on your needs.
via http
via tcp/ip or udp
via a database (or even a file)
using named sockets (on unix/linux)
using a pub-sub library
using a message queue library
by piping standard input/output
Related
Our system includes a NodeJs Restful API server. This server also serves as a socket IO server. Many devices will connect to the server by socket io, the user can control the device by calling restful API, the server will transfer command to the device through the socket IO. We used pm2 to cluster the API server. Can you help how to use Redis.io server to support to send a message from a cluster to a specific socket instance?
If you already have a redis server setup, all you have to do is setup the socket.io-redis adapter: https://www.npmjs.com/package/socket.io-redis
From there, it's best to have the incoming socket.io connections join a device specific room. This is typically achieved with a socket.join() from the connection event.
From there, you can call your .to().emit() method to send the data to the device. Using rooms allows you to ignore the socket and transmit the message to the device no matter which instance they are connected to
I have this IoT device that I am trying to connect to the server via wifi to send real time data. The server uses socket.io with node.js, but the wifi module (esp8266) I am using only has a websocket package. Would a socket.io connection be able to receive data sent via websocket?
Yes, but it will be a bit of a kludge:
socket.io supports multiple transports, of which one of them is a websocket. You can connect using only the websocket, but you will need to implement the socket.io protocol.
https://github.com/socketio/socket.io-protocol
If you are using a popular platform, there may be libraries available, i.e. for Arduino, there is:
https://github.com/billroy/socket.io-arduino-client
I have a program in an embedded device that outputs an xml string to a socket. The embedded device has lighthttpd has a web server. I want to use a web based client (no flash/silverlight) to connect to the socket and pull the xml data every second.
I looked at Node.js with Socket.io to get what I want to do, but I am not clear about how to proceed. Searching through the Node.js and Socket.io documentation and examples I see standard client-server behavior, nothing regarding what I am trying to do.
Basically, the web server is just there to accept a connection from a client on the socket that the embedded application is outputting data to. Basically the web server's purpose is to just let the client retrieve data from the raw tcp socket that the embedded application is writing to. Please advice.
I solved the problem using Websockify, which acts as bridge between a TCP Socket and a browser.
The html client will connect to a websocket, and Websockify will listen on the websocket port and transmit data between the websocket and the tcp socket.
Web browsers have the ability to do HTTP requests (which can be web page requests or Ajax requests for data) and webSocket connections. You will need to pick one of these two mechanisms if you're sticking with stock browser access.
If the lighthttpd web server in the embedded device does not support webSockets, then your choice will like be an Ajax call from the browser to your server. This is basically just an HTTP request that make return something different than a web page (often JSON data) and is designed to fetch data from the server into a web client.
If the lighthttpd web server does support webSockets, then you could use a webSocket connection to fetch the data too. This has an advantage of being a persistent connection and allows for the server to directly send data to the client (without the client even requesting more data) whenever it wants to (more efficient for constant updates).
An Ajax connection is generally not persistent. A client sends an Ajax request, the server returns the answer and the connection is closed. The next request starts a new Ajax request.
Either Ajax requests or webSocket connections should work just fine for your use. All browsers still in use support Ajax. WebSockets are supported in modern browsers (IE10 and higher).
Once you decide upon a client connection strategy, then you'd build your web app on the embedded device that served as the middleman between the browser and the data on the embedded device. It would collect the appropriate data from the embedded device and then be able to send that to browser clients that connected and requested the data.
I'm not sure exactly why you mentioned node.js. In this circumstance, it would be used as the web server and the environment for building your app and the logic that collects the data from your device and feeds it to the requesting web browser, but it sounds like you already have lighthttpd for this purpose. Personally, I recommend node.js if it works in your environment. Combined with socket.io (for webSocket support), it's a very nice way to connect browsers directly to an embedded device. I have an attic fan controller written in node.js and running on a Raspberry Pi. The node.js app monitors temperature probes and controls relays that switch attic fans and node.js also serves as a web server for me to administer and monitor the node.js. All-in-all, it's a pretty slick environment if you already know and like programming in Javascript and there's a rich set of add-in modules to extend its capabilities available through NPM. If, however, your embedded device isn't a common device that there is already support for node.js on or it doesn't already have node.js on it, then you'd be facing a porting tasks to make node.js run on it which might be more work than using some other development environment that already runs on the device like lighthttpd.
There will be no human being in the loop, and both endpoints are autonomous Node.js applications operating as independent services.
Endpoint A is responsible for contacting Endpoint B via secure web socket, and maintaining that connection 24/7/365.
Both endpoints will initiate messages independently (without human intervention), and both endpoints will have an API (RESTful or otherwise) to receive and process messages. You might say that each endpoint is both a client of, and a server to, the other endpoint.
I am considering frameworks like Sails.js and LoopBack (implemented on both endpoints), as well as simply passing JSON messages over ws, but remain unclear what the most idiomatic approach would be.
Web Sockets have a lot of overhead for connecting to browsers and what not, since they try to remain compatible with HTTP. If you're just connecting a pair of servers, a simple TCP connection will suffice. You can use the net module for this.
Now, once you have that connection, how do you initiate communication? You could go through the trouble of making your own protocol, but I don't recommend it. I found that a simple RPC was easiest. You can use the rpc-stream package over any duplex stream (including your TCP socket).
For my own application, I actually installed socket.io-client and let my servers use it for RPC. Although if I were to do it again, I would use rpc-stream to skip all the overhead required for setting up a Web Socket connection.
I want to build a service on my Linux VPS which listens to a certain UDP port and does something with the (text)message which is captured. This processing consists of appending the message to a locally stored txt-file and send it as http, with a post variable to another server.
I've looked into Nginx but as far is can see this server can only be bound to receive http packets. Although it is asynchronous.
What is the best way to achieve this listening-service on linux? And which has the capabilities to do the above mentioned processing?
Is for instance node.js a possibilty? It looks great
For simplicity, you can use xinetd, and for the app you can use any scripting language, which will read the packet from the stdin and save it to the file.