I looked through a number of posts on websockets, nodejs, and socket.io and could not find an answer to this question.
I would like to set up a development environment using nodejs to develop websockets application. I would prefer to run Windows since I have physical hardware running Windows and I am very comfortable with VS, but I could set up a Linux box running nginx or apache if necessary. I have explored iisnode, which has good support for node.js, but has no support for websockets since IIS 7.* does not support websockets. I also know Windows 8 supports websockets, but I need Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 for other tasks, so I would like to avoid that until it is released.
What has worked well for other developers of websockets using nodejs with or without windows as a server development environment?
I am using NodeJS with WAMP (win x64 php 5.x, apache 2.2.x, mysql 5.x) and I'm pretty happy with it, besides a few problem keeping up a long time socket connection between a browser and NodeJS (socket.io). As it's a socket server on its own (with socket.io), i don't have any hooks with apache ! It's pure javascript. And if i need to interact with apache/php/mysql, i just do some posts requests... Also there are modules to interact with mysql.