Simon Willison’s Weblog

Realtime Election Tweets. Jay Caines-Gooby’s realtime election tweet service, using Node.js, nginx and WebSocket with a Flash fallback.

# 6th May 2010, 9:20 pm / comet, flash, javascript, node, realtime, twitter, websockets, recovered, election, jay-caines-gooby

Web Sockets in Tornado. Bret Taylor has a simple class making it trivial to experiment with the Web Sockets protocol (now shipping in Chrome) using the scalable Tornado application server. He also raises the million dollar question: what will existing load balancers and proxies make of the new protocol?

# 31st December 2009, 11:54 am / bret-taylor, chrome, comet, python, tornado, websockets

Real time online activity monitor example with node.js and WebSocket. A neat exploration of Node.js—first hooking a “tail -f” process up to an HTTP push stream, then combining that with HTML 5 WebSockets to achieve reliable streaming.

# 8th December 2009, 11:07 pm / comet, html5, http, javascript, node, websockets

Independence Day: HTML5 WebSocket Liberates Comet From Hacks. The HTML5 spec now includes WebSocket, a TCP-style persistent socket mechanism between client and server using an HTTP handshake to work around firewalls. The Orbited comet implementation provides a WebSocket compatible API to existing browsers today, and can also act as a firewall/proxy between WebSocket and regular TCP sockets, allowing browsers to talk to things like XMPP servers using Orbited to bridge the gap.

# 4th July 2008, 9:54 am / comet, html5, orbited, sockets, tcpsocket, websockets, xmpp