Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

15 items tagged “websockets”

2023

See this page fetch itself, byte by byte, over TLS (via) George MacKerron built a TLS 1.3 library in TypeScript and used it to construct this amazing educational demo, which performs a full HTTPS request for its own source code over a WebSocket and displays an annotated byte-by-byte representation of the entire exchange. This is the most useful illustration of how HTTPS actually works that I’ve ever seen. # 10th May 2023, 1:58 pm

Quicker serverless Postgres connections. Neon provide “serverless PostgreSQL”—autoscaling, managed PostgreSQL optimized for use with serverless hosting environments. A neat capability they provide is the ability to connect to a PostgreSQL server via WebSockets, which means their database can be used from environments such as Cloudflare workers which don’t have the ability to use a standard TCP database connection. This article describes some clever tricks they used to make establishing new connections via WebSockets more efficient, using the least possible number of network round-trips. # 28th March 2023, 10:09 pm

2019

How Zoom’s web client avoids using WebRTC (via) It turns out video conferencing app Zoom uses their own WebAssembly compiled video and audio codecs and transmits H264 over WebSockets. # 18th April 2019, 6:20 pm

websocketd (via) Delightfully clever piece of design: “It’s like CGI, twenty years later, for WebSockets”. Simply run “websocketd --port=8080 my-program” and it will start up a WebSocket server on port 8080 and fire up a new process running your script every time it sees a new WebSocket connection. Standard in and standard out are automatically hooked up to the socket connection. Since it spawns a new process per connection this won’t work well with thousands of connections but for smaller scale projects it’s an excellent addition to the toolbok—and since it’s written in Go there are pre-compiled binaries available for almost everything. # 26th January 2019, 2:38 am

2018

Being fast and light: Using binary data to optimise libraries on the client and the server. (via) Ada Rose Cannon provides a detailed introduction to ArrayBuffers in JavaScript and describes how she used them for a custom binary protocol to sync the state of 170 Virtual Reality users in the same venue without bringing down the network. # 13th March 2018, 2:34 pm

Channels 2.0. Andrew just shipped Channels 2.0—a major rewrite and redesign of the Channels project he started back in 2014. Channels brings async to Django, providing a logical, standardized way of supporting things like WebSockets and asynchronous execution on top of a Django application. Previously it required you to run a separate Twisted server and redis/RabbitMQ queue, but thanks to Python 3 async everything can now be deployed as a single process. And the new ASGI spec means its turtles all the way down! Everything from URL routing to view functions to middleware can be composed together using the same ASGI interface. # 2nd February 2018, 6:19 pm

Domains Search for Web: Instant, Serverless & Global (via) The team at Zeit are pioneering a whole bunch of fascinating web engineering architectural patterns. Their new domain name autocomplete search uses Next.js and server-side rendering on first load, then switches to client-side rendering from then on. It can then load results asynchronously over a custom WebSocket protocol as the microservices on the backend finish resolving domain availability from the various different TLD providers. # 26th January 2018, 1:14 am

2017

Live htop. Neat, simplest-thing-that-could-possibly-work implementation of a tool that continually pipes the output of the htop command to a browser over a WebSocket. The htopgen.sh scripts loops every 2 seconds, runs htop, pipes it through a utility to convert the output to HTML and writes that to a file. Then the server.js Node.js script watches for changes to that file and pipes the entire file contents to the browser via socket.io. The index.html page in the browser subscribes to the WebSocket and updates the entire page using innerHTML every time it receives an event. # 1st November 2017, 6:07 pm

2016

What’s the cheapest or free stack solution to deploy and experiment with a realtime application in 2016?

Heroku have a good free tier, and comprehensive support for deploying both Python and Node.js. If you are mainly interested in realtime I would suggest starting out with Node.js on Heroku. Depending on the complexity of your project you might even be able to use raw Node.js without adding something like Express.

[... 81 words]

2012

What are the differences between node.js and websockets?

This is like asking “what’s the difference between PHP and HTTP”. Node.js is a technology framework you write code in. WebSockets is a protocol which can be implemented using a technology framework. You can use Node.js to implement the server-side aspect of WebSockets.

[... 57 words]

2010

Mongrel2 is “Self-Hosting”. Zed Shaw’s Mongrel2 is shaping up to be a really interesting project. “A web server simply written in C that loves all languages equally”, the two most interesting new ideas are the ability to handle HTTP, Flash Sockets and WebSockets all on the same port (thanks to an extension to the Mongrel HTTP parser that can identify all three protocols) and the ability to hook Mongrel2 up to the backend servers using either TCP/IP or ZeroMQ. I’m guessing this means Mongrel2 could hold an HTTP request open, fire off some messages and wait for various backends to send messages back to construct the response, making async processing just as easy as a regular blocking request/response cycle. # 17th June 2010, 8:11 pm

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

2009

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

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

2008

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