I'm in the process of learning Node and have a question I can't seem to find the answer to. In the following example of a minimalistic chat server the node server expects the client page to reside in the same directory as the server file, if I was building a client side app for a mobile device, how would I send the data back to the proper client?
var fs = require('fs')
, http = require('http')
, socketio = require('socket.io');
var server = http.createServer(function(req, res) {
res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-type': 'text/html'});
**res.end(fs.readFileSync(__dirname + '/index.html'));**
}).listen(8080, function() {
console.log('Listening at: http://localhost:8080');
});
socketio.listen(server).on('connection', function (socket) {
socket.on('message', function (msg) {
console.log('Message Received: ', msg);
socket.broadcast.emit('message', msg);
});
});
Are you running into this problem? If so, perhaps using the phonegap iOS / Android plugins for WebSockets may help you.
For reference, here is what res.end(fs.readFileSync(__dirname + '/index.html')); means:
Synchronously read the contents of the file index.html (located in the server's current directory)
End the HTTP response after sending the contents of the file over the network to the client who requested the page (could be the local machine, a phone, a computer on the internet -- anyone who has access to the server). In other words, node is acting as an HTTP server for the page index.html
Index.html presumably contains some socket-related code that instructs the client to connect to the socket on the server (the server's socket is created by socketio.listen(server))