Advanced Node.js Development

Emitting and listening to custom events

In the previous section, you learned how to listen to those built-in events—things such as connection events and disconnection events. Those are fine, and they're a great starting place, but in this section, what we want to talk about is emitting and listening to custom events, and this is where Socket.io gets really interesting.

When you're able to emit and listen to custom events, you can send anything you want from the server to the client or from the client to the server. Now, to go through a quick example of how that'll look, we're going to use an example app, which will be an email application:

On the left, we have our server, which is starting up a Socket.io web server. On the right, we have ...