We previously created an Express application. This application is just the foundation. We are going to add features until it is a fully usable app. We currently can serve web pages and respond to HTTP, but now we want to add real-time communication. It's very fortunate that we just spent most of this chapter learning about Socket.IO; it does just that! Let's see how we are going to integrate Socket.IO with an Express application.

We are going to use Express and Socket.IO side by side. As I mentioned before, Socket.IO does not use HTTP like a web application. It is event based, not request based. This means that Socket.IO will not interfere with Express routes that we have set up, and that's a good thing. The bad thing is that we will not have access to all the middleware that we set up for Express in Socket.IO. There are some frameworks that combine these two, but it still has to convert the request from Express into something that Socket.IO can use. I...