5 ms·

WebSockets: Stable and Ready for Developers

83 points by leggetter 15y ago

leggetter 15y ago
By a guy from Microsoft so plenty of MS examples/links, but a good overview of WebSockets never the less. I'm interested to hear how many of use will ever actually use the `WebSocket` object? Will we (developers) always use a library offering a layer of abstraction and the real core functionality that we need.
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
  The WebSocket API is very simple, there wouldn't be much need to abstract it.
  - leggetter 15y ago
    The point in abstraction in this case is to add additional functionality. The most obvious option, and something I thought might have become part of the WebSocket API, is auto-reconnection. To reconnect you need to create another WebSocket object and reattach all your event listeners. So, I'm convinced that the majority of people who use WebSockets will have to write their own custom code for this and will probably put it in their own little library which wraps around using WebSocket objects. More info in the comment here: http://www.sitepoint.com/websockets-stable-and-ready-for-developers/#comment-1043114 http://www.sitepoint.com/websockets-stable-and-ready-for-dev...
VikingCoder 15y ago
I would really love a free C# implementation of a Socket.IO WebSocket, with as few external dependencies as possible.
- leggetter 15y ago
  Are their commercial versions of socket.io for C# available? When it comes to .NET people tend to go with signalR (which I think has WebSocket support but not within ISS - until Windows 8 server), SuperWebsocket or XSockets.
- ajacksified 15y ago
  http://www.alchemywebsockets.net http://www.alchemywebsockets.net (a friend and I built this.) Handles a ridiculously large amount of connections thanks to an awesome threading model. MIT licensed. Supports the RFC version and some older versions.
darklajid 15y ago
"Stable and ready for developers" and mixing it with links to the .Net framework 4.5 beta documentation seems off. Sure, it can be stable. And ready is kind of subjective. But the 'Use this, now' feeling I got from the title was quickly nowhere to be found. That said: I liked the whole walkthrough and general depth of the article.
- rada 15y ago
  It seems "off" because it is: http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets I would love to use web sockets in my app to replace long polling but without IE/Android, it's a non-starter.
  - leggetter 15y ago
    https://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js https://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js is a good fallback which uses Flash Sockets. Whether you can use them or not really depends on your target user. I'd argue that for the general public you can use them; they'll be using IE with Flash, Firefox or Chrome. With the latter two you'll have native WebSocket support and with all three it's highly likely that all with have Flash installed. Things are trickier for corporate users where it depends on the corporate IT policy. As ever, there are edge cases.
  - Cacti 15y ago
    By the time you're done porting your app to websockets, IE/Android will be ready, or at least close.
  - mibbitier 15y ago
    try websockets, if fails, use comet. It's not rocket science. (Mibbit has been using websocket in production for 2.5 years or so)
    - rada 15y ago
      I am already using comet, what's the benefit of trying websockets first? P.S. "It's not rocket science" snark completely uncalled for.
wowfat 15y ago
On a related note we put out a tech demo showing nodejs and socketio recently. http://www.webdigi.co.uk/fun/space/ http://www.webdigi.co.uk/fun/space/ It uses iPhone accelerometer to control the ship on your browser game!
factorialboy 15y ago
At Review19 - http://review19.com http://review19.com - we are primarily using web sockets but we have fallback / failover transports in place. What helps is the very awesome Socket.io abstraction, just mention websockets and a bunch of fallbacks in the config and get coding. Must say having JavaScript on the server, the client and the data store is a huge advantage as well from a programming context perspective!
- factorialboy 15y ago
  And.. umm.. discovered couple of hours ago that things surprisingly work great on IE9 and apart from CSS disabilities fairly well in IE8. Of course, hard to say its production ready for all kinds of web apps, you must still choose based on your specific situation.
rizwan 15y ago
One of the very real issues with WebSockets is that they don't work often over mobile networks, with invisible proxying, etc. Unless you go with something like Socket.IO, WebSockets alone would never be a viable solution.
- leggetter 15y ago
  From my experience, working at Pusher and dealing with support for the past year, WebSockets do work over a mobile 3G connection when you use an SSL (wss://) connection. I tether (laptop -> mobile -> mobile data) quite a bit whilst travelling and my mobile data provider, O2, do all sorts of annoying things with dat (stop whitespace, inject JavaScript), but my WebSocket connections work flawlessly. In the same way that a WebSocket library can fallback from a WebSocket connection to a HTTP-based connection it can also first try ws:// and then fallback to wss:// - it's what our library does. The potential problem here of course is that you need an SSL certificate. When using Pusher that's not a problem, because we've bought one, but when using your own hosted solution that might mean dishing out money that you'd rather not.
- cft 15y ago
  Try a port other than 80: I have my iPod tethered via Droid 3 on a Verizon 3G network, it blocks 80, but did not block 1800
Roboprog 15y ago
Microsoft technology examples. I am a-feared. Are there wrappers in jQuery or Prototype (et al) for browser side WebSockets access yet, so I only need to worry about if it is supported, rather than how? Similarly, what does it take to support this on the server side? (in a *nix environment)
cft 15y ago
Huh? Android default browser (and most importantly, WebView) does not support WebSockets, and has no visible plans to support it. IE8/9 do not support WebSockets.
- ajacksified 15y ago
  Chrome for Android supports WebSockets, and the "visible plan" is Google's plan to switch the native browser to Chrome. Additionally, IE 10 supports WebSockets, and fallbacks exist- such as flash- to give support to earlier versions of IE. "Production Ready", in this sense, means "finalized enough that you can feel secure about implementation", just like html5 and css 3. Should you rely on css 3 alone for old versions of IE? You need fallbacks, of course. But you can feel comfortable about implementing it (with progressive enhancement or graceful degredation) for support of less-able browsers.
- leggetter 15y ago
  Some expect Chrome for Android to become the default browser (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/02/chrome-android/ http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/02/chrome-android/) and if that happens the WebSockets will be supported. Firefox for Android also supports WebSockets. I can't 100% confirm Chrome will become the default but Google are very pro WebSockets so it would be very strange for them not to support and encourage their use. There are fallback options in place that mean WebSockets can be used on Android but that tends to mean Flash lite also has to be installed.
skeltoac 15y ago
I was hoping to read an article about how WebSockets are more stable and ready today than the last time I checked.
tnash 15y ago
Does anybody know how fast connecting to a WebSockets server is? How does it compare to connecting over http? I was interested in the ws:// uri scheme as I was unaware of that. Is there a future scenario where we could connect to a WebSockets server directly through the browser without first connecting over http and then with js?
pippy 15y ago
Websockets are great, but apache and nginx are still yet to support them out of the box. You have to recompile nginx with a module and apache has to have a custom mod. When it's a case of writing in a line in nginx.conf for a proxy bypass or commenting out an apache module then it will be ready. Using port HTTP/port 80 is one of websockets strengths.
- leggetter 15y ago
  When it comes to nginx and apache you can always go down the hosted realtime infrastructure route. That way you can use WebSockets in your client (app) but you don't need to worry about installing mods or handling the persistent connections on your server. See: http://www.leggetter.co.uk/real-time-web-technologies-guide#hosted-services http://www.leggetter.co.uk/real-time-web-technologies-guide#...

83 points by leggetter 15y ago

By a guy from Microsoft so plenty of MS examples/links, but a good overview of WebSockets never the less. I'm interested to hear how many of use will ever actually use the `WebSocket` object? Will we (developers) always use a library offering a layer of abstraction and the real core functionality that we need.

TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
The WebSocket API is very simple, there wouldn't be much need to abstract it.
- leggetter 15y ago
  The point in abstraction in this case is to add additional functionality. The most obvious option, and something I thought might have become part of the WebSocket API, is auto-reconnection. To reconnect you need to create another WebSocket object and reattach all your event listeners. So, I'm convinced that the majority of people who use WebSockets will have to write their own custom code for this and will probably put it in their own little library which wraps around using WebSocket objects. More info in the comment here: http://www.sitepoint.com/websockets-stable-and-ready-for-developers/#comment-1043114 http://www.sitepoint.com/websockets-stable-and-ready-for-dev...

VikingCoder 15y ago

I would really love a free C# implementation of a Socket.IO WebSocket, with as few external dependencies as possible.

leggetter 15y ago
Are their commercial versions of socket.io for C# available? When it comes to .NET people tend to go with signalR (which I think has WebSocket support but not within ISS - until Windows 8 server), SuperWebsocket or XSockets.
ajacksified 15y ago
http://www.alchemywebsockets.net http://www.alchemywebsockets.net (a friend and I built this.) Handles a ridiculously large amount of connections thanks to an awesome threading model. MIT licensed. Supports the RFC version and some older versions.

darklajid 15y ago

"Stable and ready for developers" and mixing it with links to the .Net framework 4.5 beta documentation seems off. Sure, it can be stable. And ready is kind of subjective. But the 'Use this, now' feeling I got from the title was quickly nowhere to be found. That said: I liked the whole walkthrough and general depth of the article.

rada 15y ago
It seems "off" because it is: http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets I would love to use web sockets in my app to replace long polling but without IE/Android, it's a non-starter.
- leggetter 15y ago
  https://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js https://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js is a good fallback which uses Flash Sockets. Whether you can use them or not really depends on your target user. I'd argue that for the general public you can use them; they'll be using IE with Flash, Firefox or Chrome. With the latter two you'll have native WebSocket support and with all three it's highly likely that all with have Flash installed. Things are trickier for corporate users where it depends on the corporate IT policy. As ever, there are edge cases.
- Cacti 15y ago
  By the time you're done porting your app to websockets, IE/Android will be ready, or at least close.
- mibbitier 15y ago
  try websockets, if fails, use comet. It's not rocket science. (Mibbit has been using websocket in production for 2.5 years or so)
  - rada 15y ago
    I am already using comet, what's the benefit of trying websockets first? P.S. "It's not rocket science" snark completely uncalled for.

wowfat 15y ago

On a related note we put out a tech demo showing nodejs and socketio recently. http://www.webdigi.co.uk/fun/space/ http://www.webdigi.co.uk/fun/space/ It uses iPhone accelerometer to control the ship on your browser game!

factorialboy 15y ago

At Review19 - http://review19.com http://review19.com - we are primarily using web sockets but we have fallback / failover transports in place. What helps is the very awesome Socket.io abstraction, just mention websockets and a bunch of fallbacks in the config and get coding. Must say having JavaScript on the server, the client and the data store is a huge advantage as well from a programming context perspective!

factorialboy 15y ago
And.. umm.. discovered couple of hours ago that things surprisingly work great on IE9 and apart from CSS disabilities fairly well in IE8. Of course, hard to say its production ready for all kinds of web apps, you must still choose based on your specific situation.

rizwan 15y ago

One of the very real issues with WebSockets is that they don't work often over mobile networks, with invisible proxying, etc. Unless you go with something like Socket.IO, WebSockets alone would never be a viable solution.

leggetter 15y ago
From my experience, working at Pusher and dealing with support for the past year, WebSockets do work over a mobile 3G connection when you use an SSL (wss://) connection. I tether (laptop -> mobile -> mobile data) quite a bit whilst travelling and my mobile data provider, O2, do all sorts of annoying things with dat (stop whitespace, inject JavaScript), but my WebSocket connections work flawlessly. In the same way that a WebSocket library can fallback from a WebSocket connection to a HTTP-based connection it can also first try ws:// and then fallback to wss:// - it's what our library does. The potential problem here of course is that you need an SSL certificate. When using Pusher that's not a problem, because we've bought one, but when using your own hosted solution that might mean dishing out money that you'd rather not.
cft 15y ago
Try a port other than 80: I have my iPod tethered via Droid 3 on a Verizon 3G network, it blocks 80, but did not block 1800

Roboprog 15y ago

Microsoft technology examples. I am a-feared. Are there wrappers in jQuery or Prototype (et al) for browser side WebSockets access yet, so I only need to worry about if it is supported, rather than how? Similarly, what does it take to support this on the server side? (in a *nix environment)

cft 15y ago

Huh? Android default browser (and most importantly, WebView) does not support WebSockets, and has no visible plans to support it. IE8/9 do not support WebSockets.

ajacksified 15y ago
Chrome for Android supports WebSockets, and the "visible plan" is Google's plan to switch the native browser to Chrome. Additionally, IE 10 supports WebSockets, and fallbacks exist- such as flash- to give support to earlier versions of IE. "Production Ready", in this sense, means "finalized enough that you can feel secure about implementation", just like html5 and css 3. Should you rely on css 3 alone for old versions of IE? You need fallbacks, of course. But you can feel comfortable about implementing it (with progressive enhancement or graceful degredation) for support of less-able browsers.
leggetter 15y ago
Some expect Chrome for Android to become the default browser (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/02/chrome-android/ http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/02/chrome-android/) and if that happens the WebSockets will be supported. Firefox for Android also supports WebSockets. I can't 100% confirm Chrome will become the default but Google are very pro WebSockets so it would be very strange for them not to support and encourage their use. There are fallback options in place that mean WebSockets can be used on Android but that tends to mean Flash lite also has to be installed.

skeltoac 15y ago

I was hoping to read an article about how WebSockets are more stable and ready today than the last time I checked.

tnash 15y ago

Does anybody know how fast connecting to a WebSockets server is? How does it compare to connecting over http? I was interested in the ws:// uri scheme as I was unaware of that. Is there a future scenario where we could connect to a WebSockets server directly through the browser without first connecting over http and then with js?

pippy 15y ago

Websockets are great, but apache and nginx are still yet to support them out of the box. You have to recompile nginx with a module and apache has to have a custom mod. When it's a case of writing in a line in nginx.conf for a proxy bypass or commenting out an apache module then it will be ready. Using port HTTP/port 80 is one of websockets strengths.

leggetter 15y ago
When it comes to nginx and apache you can always go down the hosted realtime infrastructure route. That way you can use WebSockets in your client (app) but you don't need to worry about installing mods or handling the persistent connections on your server. See: http://www.leggetter.co.uk/real-time-web-technologies-guide#hosted-services http://www.leggetter.co.uk/real-time-web-technologies-guide#...