[JSConfEU 2010] Guillermo Rauch: Socket.IO - WebSockets for everyone

I'm gonna talk about socket. um it's a open source project for enabling web socket and making real- time applications easy to make um on every browser and every mobile device that we can make it work on um so my name is guer morou um I'm the CTO and

co-founder of an education startup in San Francisco uh we have a big commitment to open source um and I spent part of my time developing this technology um I've been heavily involved with no JS um since it appeared I originally developed a standalone websocket server uh that of course would only work with websocket clients and then I saw the opportunity of making websocket work on more than just Cutting

Edge browsers um I'm also a core Ms developer I've been uh working on client side JavaScript for a while and um those are my if you want to reach out um or Fork any of my projects you can go to GitHub or U follow me on Twitter or find me on free node um so socket IO is actually two projects uh there is a so iio client

that of course runs on the browser um it uses feature detection to decide um what how to establish a real-time communication to the server depending on the uh user agent capabilities and uh an officially supported socket AO node web server um there are some projects that are trying to make socket IO um work also on other Stacks such as air Lang um

python uh with tornado Twisted even Google go um so you can go to the sucket AO website to learn more about those um so the client side API looks I don't know if you guys are familiar with web socket but I'm going to go um into it later um the API that you instantiate from the client looks pretty much like websocket um it does it does more than websocket which is NE for creating real

world real real time applications um the premise is that it works in every browser so you're not concerned about compatibility is um it's lightweight it's only 10 kilobytes um when compressed um I'm going to talk a little bit about about the realtime web and what I mean when I talk about realtime web applications um there when you when we talk about realtime web applications

there are many terms that come to mind and that have been popularized over the years um such as the beay protocol Comet um this this premise of server push server sending data to the client which is reversing the request response model um now there's websocket um and all other um protocols like xmpp um so what is

which um I'm going to start by describing a really simple realtime application um a Twitter client that fetches no JS tweets as they are pushed by twitterers uh and you might wish to display the tweets on your website so the first approach that would come to mind for most people is just making ages require plus every 5