Getting Orbited to work with my Twisted app

Question

I can't seem to get Orbited working with my Twisted app. I have a page, served by Twisted (say localhost:8000/page) which includes Orbited.js from the orbited server (localhost:8001/static/Orbited.js). I then have a TCP chat server example running on port 7777. I try to use Orbited.TCPSocket to connect to the chat server:

conn=new Orbited.TCPSocket();
conn.open("localhost", 7777);
conn.send("test\r\n"); //error:  bad readyState

It works fine when Orbited is serving the page, but not when twisted serves it from a different port. My orbited.cfg looks like this:

[listen]
http://:8001

[access]
* -> localhost:7777

And before (which worked) I had this in it as well:

[static]
test=index.html

Where index.html was another page grabbing localhost:8001/static/Orbited.js, and was accessed from localhost:8001/test.

How do I need to change my config file to work with requests from my twisted site on another port?

Update

I tried changing Orbited.settings.port to 8001 before trying to open the connection, but I got an error: "unsafe javascript attempt to access frame with url http://localhost:8000/page from frame with url http://localhost:8001/static/xsdrBridge.html#1. Domains, protocols and ports must match."

Hmm, also, I just looked at the orbited wiki, and apparently, setting Orbited.settings.port is exactly what I'm supposed to do. but I'm getting horrible errors

Answer 1

I have used Orbited in the past. It works in general but there are several quirks to get it set up and running smoothly. The project itself seems to be in a state of flux (it seems to be moving to node.js). Both of these points lead me to suggest that - if you can avoid it - not to use Orbited.

Are there alternatives that are cleaner? I would say, yes. You can pretty much emulate Orbited with Websockets on stock Twisted. This will clearly work for newer browsers. What about older ones? Well, there are open-source projects that wrap websockets and fall back to flash as a transport for older browsers. The setup works quite well, and actually feels cleaner than using a solution like orbited.

If you check out http://github.com/rlotun/txWebSocket you'll find the current state of Twisted's websocket implementation, as well as an example of how to fall back to flash on older browsers. Hopefully this will be useful enough for you to serve as a drop in replacement to Orbited.