Most WebSocket clients are implemented as web pages taking advantage of the JavaScript WebSocket API. We will cover how to do this in the next section.
The Java API for WebSocket provides a client API that allows us to develop WebSocket clients as standalone Java applications. We will be covering this capability later in the chapter.
In this section, we will cover how to develop client-side JavasScript code to interact with the WebSocket endpoint we developed in the previous section.
The client page for our WebSocket example is implemented as a JSF page using HTML5 friendly markup (as explained in Chapter 2, JavaServer Faces).
Our client page consists of a text area, where we can see what users of our application are saying (it is, after all, a chat application), and an input text we can use to send a message to other users:
The markup for our client page looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> ...