Socket.io – easy way to handle WebSockets

Content Source: Python Web Development

The era of static websites has passed. Now users demand dynamic content and application like look and feel. Instead of constantly reloading the page and hitting F5, the page should adjust itself automatically. Many of this can be accomplished with simple asynchronous requests from javascript. But what if you want to update your app only when there is a new data available on the server?

You could send a ton of requests in a loop but that’ll use a lot of bandwidth and with more users could potentially DDoS your server or make it very slow. Web technologies are constantly evolving so it’s not exceptional that we have a solution for this problem. It’s called WebSockets.

Websockets allows us to establish a stateful connection between browser and server so we can exchange pieces of information in both directions. It’s more efficient than standard request and response cycle from HTTP.

Unfortunately, WebSockets are handled differently on different browsers so it’s not easy to implement the cross-browser code. And how about older browsers that don’t support WebSockets? We need some kind of wrapper that will work on different browsers and fallback to polling techniques on older ones. Socket.io does exactly that and also provides nice API and many additional features like broadcasting. Read more…..