This is a work in progress. It does not work yet.
This is a project aimed at getting a stable socket.io-like library to communicate between a node.js server and a browser.
It will:
- Work on modern browsers (IE8+, FF3.5+, Chrome, Safari, Opera)
- Be super thoroughly tested
- Work in any network environment (incl. behind buffering proxies)
- Not depend on websockets
It will not:
- Do RPC
- Land in an inconsistant state
- Work in cross-origin environments in all browsers. If you want to host static content in one process and do dynamic stuff somewhere else, you should use (nginx)[http://nginx.net/] or something to proxy stablesocket connections to your nodejs server process.
This project is losely modelled around Google's (BrowserChannel)[http://closure-library.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/closure/goog/net/browserchannel.js], which is what google uses for gchat, gmail and google plus. BrowserChannel is partially documented (here)[http://code.google.com/p/libevent-browserchannel-server/wiki/BrowserChannelProtocol].
Stablesocket uses long polling HTTP GETs to move content from the server to the client, and a series of POST requests to move data from the client to the server. This is higher bandwidth than websockets, but I don't care. Eventually I'd like stablesocket to use websockets when available, but the websocket spec is far too unstable for that right now.