Communicating through web sockets

Sometimes, it's better to have fast, bi-directional communication between the browser and the server.

At such a time, you can try web sockets. They're an upgrade to the traditional HTTP communication seen in Ajax. To work with them easily, we need the help of Socket.IO:

npm install --save socket.io

Now we can access a new object, which we'll call io:

// ...enable JSX/ES6 compilation

var app = require("express")();
var server = require("http").Server(app);
var io = require("socket.io")(server);

app.get("/", function (request, response) {
    response.send(
        require("./hello-world")
    );
});

// ...define other endpoints

io.on("connection", function (socket) {
    console.log("connection");

    socket.on("message", function (message) {
        console.log("message: " + message);

        io.emit("message", message);
    });
});

server.listen(3000);

Note

The "message" can be anything. You can send messages of different types simply by changing this...