How to Use Sockets in JavaScript\HTML?

Question

How to Use Sockets in JavaScript\HTML?

May be using some cool HTML5 technics?

Libs? Tutorials? Blog Articles?

Answer 1

Specifications:

• W3C - The Web Sockets API

Articles:

• HTML5 WebSocket and WebJneering
• WebSocket is neither Web nor Socket
• What the Web Sockets Protocol means for web startups

Tutorial:
None found so far

Libraries:

• Check this SO post html5 websocket need server?, it links to http://www.kaazing.com/download

Answer 2

How to Use Sockets in JavaScript/HTML?

There is no facility to use general-purpose sockets in JS or HTML. It would be a security disaster, for one.

There is WebSocket in HTML5. The client side is fairly trivial:

socket= new WebSocket('ws://www.example.com:8000/somesocket');
socket.onopen= function() {
    socket.send('hello');
};
socket.onmessage= function(s) {
    alert('got reply '+s);
};

You will need a specialised socket application on the server-side to take the connections and do something with them; it is not something you would normally be doing from a web server's scripting interface. However it is a relatively simple protocol; my noddy Python SocketServer-based endpoint was only a couple of pages of code.

In any case, it doesn't really exist, yet. Neither the JavaScript-side spec nor the network transport spec are nailed down, and no browsers support it.

You can, however, use Flash where available to provide your script with a fallback until WebSocket is widely available. Gimite's web-socket-js is one free example of such. However you are subject to the same limitations as Flash Sockets then, namely that your server has to be able to spit out a cross-domain policy on request to the socket port, and you will often have difficulties with proxies/firewalls. (Flash sockets are made directly; for someone without direct public IP access who can only get out of the network through an HTTP proxy, they won't work.)

Unless you really need low-latency two-way communication, you are better off sticking with XMLHttpRequest for now.