Book Image

Socket.IO Real-time Web Application Development

By : Rohit Rai
Book Image

Socket.IO Real-time Web Application Development

By: Rohit Rai

Overview of this book

<p>The expectations of users for interactivity withweb applications have changed over the past few years. No more does the user want to press the refresh button to check if new messages have arrived in their inbox; people expect to see updates in their applications in real-time. Mass multiplayer online games have given up the requirement of plugins and are built entirely in JavaScript. Socket.io enables you to build these highly interactive applications that work cross-browser.<br /><br />"Socket.io Real-time Web Application Development" is a guide to building, deploying, and scaling highly interactive real-time web applications using socket.io. This book will guide you through the building of a chat system using Node.js and socket.io, helping you get familiar with various features of the framework. Going further it will empower you to deploy and scale your applications in production.<br /><br />Introducing web application development with Node.js, this book walks you through developing of a full-fledged chat system built with socket.io and introducing all the concepts of socket.io and its usage in the process.<br /><br />It introduces you to the different approaches of bidirectional communication between the browser and the web server and will show you how socket.io abstracts all this for you to provide a single unified and uniform API for messaging and eventing to develop cross-browser applications. It explains how to authenticate your users, segregate the communication to channels, build chat rooms, and handle and scale sessions. It explains the mechanics behind socket.io and it also introduces you to what is involved in deploying the application to production and the intricacies involved in scaling it. <br /><br />This book will introduce you to all that is needed in browser-server communication to develop the next generation of interactive applications and games.</p>

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Socket.IO Real-time Web Application Development
Rohit Rai
Feb, 2013 | 140 pages
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Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Socket.IO Real-time Web Application Development
Socket.IO Real-time Web Application Development
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Going Real Time on the Web
Going Real Time on the Web
What is real-time web?
A bit of history
Applications of real-time web
Summary
2
Getting Started with Node.js
Getting Started with Node.js
The origin of Node.js
Why Node.js
How to get Node.js
Node.js package manager (npm)
Hello World with Node.js
Hello Web
Routing the requests
HTTP Methods
Creating our own Modules
Serving files
Third party modules and Express JS
Summary
3
Let's Chat
Let's Chat
Creating the application
Designing the chat room
Bringing in jQuery
Socket.IO
Handling events
The server
The client
Summary
4
Making It More Fun!
Making It More Fun!
Giving names to users
More on events
Working with namespaces
Rooms
Listing the rooms
Sharing the session
Summary
5
The Socket.IO Protocol
The Socket.IO Protocol
Why do we need another protocol?
The Socket.IO socket
The Socket.IO connection
Socket.IO messages
Summary
6
Deploying and Scaling
Deploying and Scaling
The production environment
Running the application
Keeping it running
Scaling
The node cluster
Scaling up the application
Tips for node in production
Summary
Socket.IO Quick Reference
Socket.IO Quick Reference
The server
Server events
The client
Client events
Socket.IO Backends
Socket.IO Backends
Erlang
Google Go
Java
Perl
Python
Summary
Index
Index

About the Reviewers

Arnout Kazemier is a Software Engineer from the Netherlands. He was originally schooled as a multimedia designer, but quickly rolled in to the world of frontend development and started to appreciate the beauty of JavaScript. After finding out that it was also possible to write JavaScript on the server side, he started using Aptana Jaxer and Narwal in his spare time. It wasn't until much later that Arnout heard about Node.js and its possibilities, and decided to take it for a spin when version 0.1.3 was released. Since then, he has never looked back. When Arnout joined the first Node.js hackatron (Node Knockout 2010), he built a real-time heat mapping engine on Node.js using Socket.IO. During the programming contest he learned a lot about Socket.IO and solved tons of issues that he encountered during the development of his entry. When the contest ended, he didn't stop contributing to Socket.IO, eventually becoming the first core team member of Socket.IO. He has been talking at different tech conferences since. Fast forwarding to 2013, he now spends time working on his own startup website http://observe.it (it won Node Knockout 2011) which allows you to observe and learn from your user's behavior in real time. He's still actively involved with the development of Socket.IO and conducts research on the connectivity of the real-time web and the impact of firewalls & virus scanners.

Andrew Keig has been building cutting-edge web applications for over 12 years. Andrew is a director at airasoul.net, which he runs with his artist wife Rima. Airasoul specializes in the design and build of scalable, RESTful, specification-driven, real-time web and mobile-based applications on both the Node.js and .NET stacks.

Andrew has a degree in Computing, and blogs at blog.airasoul.net on topics he is passionate about, such as Node.js, REST, Web APIs and Behavior-Driven Development. Andrew contributes to various open source projects for Node.js and .NET.

Andrew lives in London with his family: wife Rima and his son and inspiration, Indie.

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