Socket.IO Real-time Web Application Development

Build modern real-time web applications powered by Socket.IO

Overview

• Understand the usage of various socket.io features like rooms, namespaces, and sessions.
• Secure the socket.io communication.
• Deploy and scale your socket.io and Node.js applications in production.
• A practical guide that quickly gets you up and running with socket.io

In Detail

The expectations of users for interactivity withweb applications have changed over the past few years. No more does the user want to press the refresh button to check if new messages have arrived in their inbox; people expect to see updates in their applications in real-time. Mass multiplayer online games have given up the requirement of plugins and are built entirely in JavaScript. Socket.io enables you to build these highly interactive applications that work cross-browser.

“Socket.io Real-time Web Application Development” is a guide to building, deploying, and scaling highly interactive real-time web applications using socket.io. This book will guide you through the building of a chat system using Node.js and socket.io, helping you get familiar with various features of the framework. Going further it will empower you to deploy and scale your applications in production.

Introducing web application development with Node.js, this book walks you through developing of a full-fledged chat system built with socket.io and introducing all the concepts of socket.io and its usage in the process.

It introduces you to the different approaches of bidirectional communication between the browser and the web server and will show you how socket.io abstracts all this for you to provide a single unified and uniform API for messaging and eventing to develop cross-browser applications. It explains how to authenticate your users, segregate the communication to channels, build chat rooms, and handle and scale sessions. It explains the mechanics behind socket.io and it also introduces you to what is involved in deploying the application to production and the intricacies involved in scaling it

This book will introduce you to all that is needed in browser-server communication to develop the next generation of interactive applications and games.

What you will learn from this book

• Establish a bidirectional connection in the browser to the web server.
• Develop a chat system using Node.js and socket.io.
• Various methods of pushing information from the server to the browser.
• Get familiar with socket.io API for cross-browser bidirectional communication.
• Understand the socket.io protocol and its mechanics behind the scenes.
• Get to know Socket.io messaging, events, sessions, authorization, namespaces, and rooms.
• Cluster and distribute the socket.io sessions using redis session store.

Approach

Written in an engaging, easy-to-follow style, “Socket.io Real-time Web Application Development” is a practical guide for developing real-time web applications with Node.js and socket.io.

Who this book is written for

This book is aimed at developers who want to start developing highly interactive and real-time web applications like chat systems or online multiplayer games, or want to introduce real-time updates or server push mechanisms in their existing applications. Knowledge of developing in JavaScript and web applications in general is expected. Though there is a chapter on introducing Node.js, prior knowledge of Node.js will be a plus..

Table of Contents

Preface
Chapter 1: Going Real Time on the Web
Chapter 2: Getting Started with Node.js
Chapter 3: Let’s Chat
Chapter 4: Making It More Fun!
Chapter 5: The Socket.IO Protocol
Chapter 6: Deploying and Scaling
Appendix A: Socket.IO Quick Reference
Appendix B: Socket.IO Backends
Index