Alternative Socket IO Client

Question

Alternative Socket IO Client

I am trying to implement a device pairing program with nodejs. The server is implemented by someone else and uses socket io:

var http = require('http'),
io = require('socket.io');

But one of the devices that I am pairing does not support Websocket(HTML5). Is is possible to create a socket io client without using socket io, are there any alternatives?

Thanks in advance.

html5
node.js
websocket
socket.io

Answer 1

socket.io supports various transports such as flashsockets and XHR long-polling. So you do not have to use a different client - it should work out of the box even without Websocket support

Speaking of alternatives... there are some client libraries e.g. for Python but I don't think there are any that run in the browser - as I said before, there's no need for them.

Answer 2

After a lot of try and catch, I have found that the browser that I am using, can not support buffering behaviour in Socket.IO.js . The first emit is done without buffering, therefore first pairing request can be emitted correctly. So I have changed Socket.prototype.setBuffer(true) to Socket.prototype.setBuffer(false). This may not be a clean solution, but in my case it works.

Answer 3

You can configure which types of fallbacks you'd like to use

io.configure("production", function() {
  io.enable("browser client minification");
  io.enable("browser client etag");
  io.enable("browser client gzip");
  io.set("transports", ['websocket', 'jsonp-polling']);
  io.set("log level", 1);
});

io.configure("development", function() {
  io.set("transports", ['websocket', 'jsonp-polling']);
});

you can see all the options here on the wiki