WebSocket

Chapter 2. WebSocket API

This chapter exposes the details behind using the WebSocket application programming interface (API). WebSocket is an event-driven, full-duplex asynchronous communications channel for your web applications. It has the ability to give you real-time updates that in the past you would use long polling or other hacks to achieve. The primary benefit is reducing resource needs on both the client and (more important) the server.

While WebSocket uses HTTP as the initial transport mechanism, the communication doesn’t end after a response is received by the client. Using the WebSocket API, you can be freed from the constraints of the typical HTTP request/response cycle. This also means that as long as the connection stays open, the client and server can freely send messages asynchronously without polling for anything new.

Throughout this chapter you’ll build a simple stock-ticker client using WebSocket as data transport and learn about its simple API in the process. You’re going to create a new project folder, ch2, to store all of your code for this chapter. Your client code will be in a file named client.html, and your server code in a file named server.js.

Initializing

The constructor for WebSocket requires a URL in order to initiate a connection to the server. By default, if no port is specified after the host, it will connect via port 80 (the HTTP port) or port 443 (the HTTPS port).

If you’re running a traditional web server on port 80 already, you’ll have to ...