Preface

Socket.IO is an excellent library for real-time messaging between the client side and the server side. Whether you want to create a chat room in your browser, reload your hybrid mobile application, or push fresh data to an internal dashboard, this book will show you how to do it.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Wiring It Up, provides a quick introduction to Socket.IO. It tells you how to get up and running with a Node server. This chapter concludes with debugging tips for the server and the client.

Chapter 2, Creating Real-Time Dashboards, talks about how to stream data from the server to the client. It covers how to emit MongoDB data and how to handle Socket.IO connection timeouts.

Chapter 3, Having Two-Way Conversations, provides several recipes on how to build a two-way communication. From the quintessential chat room example to a fun recipe on how to create a real-time tic-tac-toe game, it includes several other topics.

Chapter 4, Building a Room with a View, explores views and namespaces and how they can be used to target your events to specific consumers.

Chapter 5, Securing Your Data, takes a look at how to secure the Socket.IO communication with various forms of authentication, including how to lock down the HTTP referrer and how to use secure web sockets.

Chapter 6, Performing a Load Balancing Act, covers various techniques for load-balancing Socket.IO, focusing on technologies such as Redis, Memcached, and RabbitMQ.

Chapter 7, Streaming Binary Data, explores topics ranging from emitting images as data to streaming video and audio.

Chapter 8, Integrating With Mobile Applications, talks about various techniques for using Socket.IO in mobile applications. It also provides a recipe for how to trigger hot deploys from Socket.IO.

What you need for this book

This book was written using a Macbook Air running Node. However, Node and Socket.IO can be run on a Windows or Linux machine as well.

All the software used in this book is free and open source. You will definitely need to be running Node for most of the recipes. There are also some sections that cover MongoDB, Redis, Memcached, and RabbitMQ.

Who this book is for

If you have some knowledge of JavaScript and Node.js and want to create awe-inspiring application experiences with real-time communication, then this book is for you. Developers with knowledge of other languages should also be able to easily follow along.

Sections

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it..., How it works..., There's more..., and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

Getting ready

This section tells you what to expect in the recipe and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.

How to do it…

This section contains the steps required to follow the recipe.

How it works…

This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.

There's more…

This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.

See also

This section provides helpful links to other useful information for the recipe.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, and user input are shown as follows: "We can include Socket.IO by using the require('socket.io') statement."

A block of code is set as follows:

var io = require('socket.io');

io.on('connection', function (socket) {
     socket.emit('connected');
});

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "For this example we will use Redis to propagate our state across servers."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Errata

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Questions

If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at <[e-mail]>, and we will do our best to address the problem.