In this chapter, we've gone over three of the major strategies employed when building real-time applications: AJAX, WebSocket, and SSE. We've shown that non-trivial collaborative applications can be developed with very little code using Node. We've also seen how some of these strategies enable the modeling of client/server communication as an evented data stream interface. We've considered the pros and cons of these various techniques, and we've gone through some clear examples of the best places to use each one.
Additionally, we've shown how client identifiers and state data can be built and managed within a Node server, so that state changes can be safely encapsulated in a central location and broadcast out to many connected clients safely and predictably. Demonstrating the quality of the modules being developed with the Node community,...