Socket.IO

I use Socket.IO because the application has 2 frontend clients, which need to communicate in real-time. The backend-server handles the communication between these two clients via websockets. Socket.io is very easy to set up in Node.js and ExpressJS.

In the research project, the 1st client shows panoramic videos in a so called cave system (it is the VR setup of our research lab, which consists of three big screens, which are specially arranged, so the user experience the videos more immersive), the 2nd client controls the videos/locations of the 1st client.

I have always been interested in building a real-time multiplayer game engine that could be massively scalable, and recently I decided to start working on a MMO version of the classic "snake" game. I wanted the entire #Stack to be based on ES6 JavaScript so for the #Backend I chose to use FeathersJS with MongoDB for game/user data storage, Redis for distributed mutex and pub/sub, and Socket.IO for real-time communication. For the #Frontend I used React with Redux.js, the FeathersJS client as well as HTML5 canvas to render the view.

Our most used programming languages are JavaScript / Node.js for it's lightweight and fast use, PHP because everyone knows it, HTML5 because you can't live without it and Sass to write great CSS. Occasionally, we use nginx as a web server and proxy, React for our UX, PostgreSQL as fast relational database, Ubuntu as server OS, ES6 and TypeScript for Node, Google Compute Engine for our infrastructure, and Socket.IO and Electron for specific use cases. We also use Python for some of our backends.

Where we have browser support (recent Chrome, Firefox, and Safari), we make a WebSocket connection so that the server can push changes made by other people down to browsers listening on the appropriate channels. We use a modified version* of the Socket.io client and server libraries that allows us to keep many thousands of open WebSockets on each of our servers at very little cost in terms of CPU or memory usage. So when anything happens to a board you’re watching, that action is published to our server processes and propagated to your watching browser with very minimal latency, usually well under a second. Socket.IO

Socket.IO is used for basic websocket capabilities. Used for simple chat applications, and features that require realtime interactions with servers or other clients. Socket.IO

The real-time portion of Academus Chat is powered by Node.js and Socket.IO. It is bound to our backend web app by an internal API, and it allows us to provide a fast, realtime experience to our users without any hiccups.