HTML5 Canvas, 2nd Edition

Multiplayer Applications with ElectroServer 5

Because Flash has built-in support for communication via sockets, its applications have had the ability to open socket communications with server-side applications for many years. HTML (until Web Sockets), on the other hand, has never had the ability to reliably communicate to a socket server without performing some sleight of hand, usually involving constant polling by the web browser for new information from the web server.

ElectroServer from Electrotank was one of the first reliable socket-server applications built to communicate with Flash clients. Over the past couple years, ElectroServer has been updated with APIs for iOS, C#, C++, and now JavaScript. This first iteration of the ElectroServer JavaScript API does not use WebSockets but instead implements JavaScript polling. However, with the availability of ElectroServer’s simplified JavaScript API, you can still start to write multiplayer applications using HTML5 Canvas.

Note

While this portion of the chapter is specific to ElectroServer, many of the multiplayer/multiuser concepts are applicable to other technologies as well.