Introduction

Although there is a great deal of power in bidirectional communication, Socket.IO is also a perfect tool for creating unidirectional real-time experiences. Many applications need to have some sort of dashboard interface to display analytical data or to show the state of the application data. For an application state that frequently changes, or if there are multiple users changing the state, creating the dashboard in real time makes for a much better experience.

In this chapter, we will implement various techniques to display and maintain real-time dashboards that only harness a unidirectional data flow in order to pass data from the server to the client.