Before the internet, communication looked like this: you’d write a letter, drop it in the mailbox, and wait days for a reply. Early websites weren’t that different. You sent a request, waited for the server, and refreshed to see what changed. The web used to be that simple. But today, users expect instant updates. Be it chat messages that appear in real-time, live notifications, dashboards that update without hitting refresh.
Then came AJAX in the early 2000s, and suddenly pages could fetch bits of data without reloading. That opened the door for features like live search suggestions and background updates.
But as users demanded more live chat, multiplayer games, collaborative tools, developers started to hack together “real-time” with long polling and other tricks. These worked, but they were clunky, unreliable, and hard to scale.
Enter WebSockets: a protocol that let browsers and servers keep a persistent two-way connection. Real-time communication was finally possible. And on top of WebSockets, libraries like Socket.IO emerged to smooth over the rough edges, handling fallbacks, reconnections, and cross-browser quirks so you could just focus on building.
What is Socket.IO?
Socket.IO is a JavaScript library that enables real-time, bidirectional communication between clients (usually browsers) and servers. It’s built on top of WebSockets but adds important features like:
- Automatic reconnection
- Event-based communication (you can define custom events)
- Support for rooms and namespaces
- Fallbacks when WebSockets aren’t available With Node.js on the backend and Socket.IO handling connections, you can build highly interactive applications with just a few lines of code.
In the next part, I walk through setting up a Socket.IO server, handling events, and building a simple real-time feature step by step. Read the full post here: https://manasajayasri.github.io/Building-with-Socketio.html
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