WebFund 2014W: Tutorial 10

This tutorial is not yet finalized.

Note that the material for today's tutorial is optional. If you are behind use this time to work on other material related to this class (and ask TAs about it to get attendance credit).

In this tutorial you'll learn about websockets and how they compare to AJAX for client-server communications.

First, go through the WebSockets tutorial by Pedro Teixeira. The code in this tutorial is available on github. A local copy of the code with necessary modules is [ here]. (If you have problems in Firefox be sure to try it in Chrome.) Don't forget to open the JavaScript console to see the client side output!

Note that this tutorial makes use of several unfamiliar packages:

• shoe, a websockets library for node
• ecstatic, a standalone static file web server for node (that can also be used with express)
• node streams form the base class for shoe and many other core node modules including http.createServer()

You may want to spend some time looking at these to see how they integrate with node.

After you get the ping/pong example working, your main task is to use this code to change adventure-ajax-demo from Tutorial 6 to use websockets (i.e., shoe) instead of AJAX (getJSON and post on the client) to update room state.