Build real-time web applications using WebSockets!

Gürkan UÇAR

Published in

folksdev

2 min readSep 5, 2022

What is the WebSocket?

WebSocket is a bi-directional communication protocol. Communication provides over a single TCP connection.

Thanks to the WebSocket protocol server and client can communicate in real-time.

Where can we use WebSockets?

There are many cases to use WebSocket

Chat Applications
Location Tracking
Game Development
Collaborative Apps
Trade and Cryptocurrency Apps

What is the difference between HTTP and WebSocket Connection?

HTTP is unidirectional, and WebSocket is bi-directional.
When you send an HTTP request connection will close after getting a response but when you connect over WebSocket and send data to the server, the connection will still be alive.
WebSocket is faster than HTTP.
HTTP is stateless and opens a new connection for each request, but WebSocket can communicate over a single connection.

Some WebSocket Libraries

SocketIO : Very popular socket library => github.com/socketio

WS: github.com/websockets/ws

SockJS : github.com/sockjs/sockjs-client

Feathers: github.com/feathersjs/feathers

SocketCluster: github.com/SocketCluster/socketcluster

WebSocket Alternatives

Short Polling: send and receive requests at specific time intervals (every x seconds)

Long Polling: send and receive requests at specific time intervals but the server will keep the requests open until the timeout. If the server finds something it will respond (timeout 5 seconds, server found something in 2 seconds. It will respond).

Server-Sent Events: SSE is a uni-directional communication channel from server to client only. Server-Sent Events allow receiving data without polling. A client subscribes to a “stream” from a server and the server will send messages to the “event stream”. Mostly used for push notifications.

BONUS

Spring Boot & SocketIO & Reactjs — Chat application

github.com/gurkanucar/socketio-simple-chat