Book Image

Socket.IO Cookbook

By : Tyson Cadenhead
Book Image

Socket.IO Cookbook

By: Tyson Cadenhead

Overview of this book

Socket.IO is a JavaScript library that provides you with the ability to implement real-time analytics, binary streaming, instant messaging, and document collaboration. It has two parts: a client-side library that runs in the browser, and a server-side library for node.js. Socket.IO is event-driven and primarily uses the WebSocket protocol that allows us to emit data bi-directionally from the server and the client. Socket.IO This book is a complete resource, covering topics from webSocket security to scaling the server-side of a Socket.IO application and everything in between. This book will provide real-world examples of how secure bi-directional, full-duplex connections that can be created using Socket.IO for different environments. It will also explain how the connection vulnerabilities can be resolved for large numbers of users and huge amounts of data/messages. By the end of the book, you will be a competent Socket.IO developer. With the help of the examples and real-world solutions,you will learn to create fast, scalable, and dynamic real-time apps by creating efficient messaging systems between the server side and the client side using Socket.IO.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Socket.IO Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating private rooms


It can often be useful to provide privacy for certain rooms. This allows you to send messages to a small group of sockets without worrying about the messages being received by sockets that should not be allowed to see them.

Although Socket.IO doesn't have any inbuilt way to consider a room private or public, we can add some logic around joining a room so that only sockets that validate against a password check are allowed to be members of the room.

In this recipe, we will create a simple login page. Sockets can log in with the static password: pass123, but we could easily make it use a dynamic password that comes from our database or an environmental variable. When the socket joins a group, it will be able to see all the messages that are emitted to this group as expected.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will use jQuery for the DOM manipulation.

We will also make use of the MD5 Node module to hash our password. Although it may seem silly to hash a password that is hardcoded...