Sock It

THIS IS A VERY EARLY DEVELOPMENT VERSION!!!

Don't use in a production environment, it is created and tested for a very specific set of problems!

Also be sure to read the Known Bugs document.

What is it?

An attempt to create a WebSocket API compatible library, that has a thin wrapper around WebSockets with a fat polling fallback for legacy browsers.

It is not meant to solve all problems related to WebSocket/polling, like be the absolutely fastest solution or support ALL possible scenarios.

What it IS meant to solve:

• Speed (e.g. as fast as possible, while still solving the other points)
• Tiny wrapper around WebSocket, working as directly as possible with native WebSocket
• Fallback to JSON poll, when WebSocket is not around
• Scalable backend code through Redis (both horizontally and vertically)
• Emphasis on leaving as much to WebSockets as possible, when available
• Compatibility with IE8+, Safari, Chrome, Firefox

What it is NOT meant to solve:

• Speed (e.g. this is not going to be THE fastest WS/poll library around)
• Being able to work under ANY proxy/router configuration out there
• Working with > legacy browsers (Currently focus is on IE8+, but should be fine, down to IE6)
• Achieving WebSocket speeds when falling back to poll

Future

As always: as soon as the module has shown it's worth and stability on a live system, it will be marked as version >= 1.0.0.

Until then: Feel free to play around with it, learn from it, help with it, etc.