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..

Rohit Rai is an accomplished software engineering professional and entrepreneur with several years of experience in developing products and consulting with clients on a variety of technologies, from enterprise applications on .NET and Java EE, consumer web applications focusing on JavaScript, data engineering and analytics platforms such as Pentaho and Hadoop, to modern platforms such as Groovy, Scala, and Node.js. He is a founder of TupleJump, a startup building a new-generation data engineering platform for unifying and optimizing the workflows of data scientists, engineers, and analysts, bringing in innovative data process development approaches and modern visualization frameworks, all built on cutting-edge technologies designed to scale transparently from a single machine to large, distributed big data clusters. He has previously worked with Cordys R&D, Pramati technologies, and various startups. He has consulted with clients like Intel and Sun, helping them develop products like Mash Maker and Zembly, powered by JavaScript. He was a member of one of the first teams on SocialTwist and developed one of the first widgets as a service platform and framework, which continues to power this widely-successful social media marketing and referral platform used by many Fortune 500 companies. In open source, Rohit is a core committer and the administrator of Matisse (http://www.matisse.org/), the collaborative design platform. He is also the creator of socket.io.play, the Socket.IO module for the Play framework, and various open source projects hosted at GitHub (https://github.com/rohit-tingendab).