Building real-time applications with Node.js

Real-time applications like chats, large-scale games, collaborative editing require a new way to communicate with server and a different approach designing them. Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easy building fast, scalable real-time network applications.
This presentation walks you through the process of building a real-time app with Node.js and Socket.io.

Transcript

1. BUILDING REAL-TIME APPLICATIONS WITH NODE.JS Serge Barysiuk CTO, Propellerz serge@propellerz.com
2. About me • CTO and co-founder at Propellerz • founded a few startups - Quote Roller, NotiNote • a big JS fan - client and server side
3. What is Node.js? • JavaScript programming environment • Uses V8 runtime (Chrome’s JS runtime) • Event driven, single threaded • Non blocking I/O
4. What is non-blocking? Synchronous I/O Thread File I/O waiting Asynchronous I/O Thread File I/O
5. What is non-blocking? Synchronous I/O Asynchronous I/O
6. How to start with Node.js? • Install Node from nodejs.org (Mac, Linux Windows) • Install NPM from npmjs.org • Run your app as
7. npm: Batteries provided
8. Simple web server
9. Real-time web In real-time world, there is no polling. Instead, there are subscriptions. Changes don't need to be pulled because they're pushed instead.
10. Non real-time web any message? response any message? response any message? response Client Server
11. Real-time web connect response response response Client Server message
12. How to achieve? History • Polling • Comet Present • WebSockets
13. Polling & Comet Using different approaches to implement streaming: Iframe Streaming, Flash Streaming, XHR Streaming, JSONP Polling • Works in old browsers • Inefficient • Hard to scale + - -
14. Web Sockets • Full-duplex communication over a TCP socket • Lightweight: no TCP handshake, no HTTP headers overhead • Only new modern browsers - + +
15. Socket.io • WebSockets transport • Fallback transports for old browsers (Flash Sockets, XHR Long Polling, JSON Pooling) • Heartbeats, timeouts and disconnection support + + +
16. Socket.io: client side
17. Socket.io: server side
18. Show me a real thing! Dots demo application http://topconf-dots.jit.su/
19. Demo app: explained Client Server connection ready * joined move * move move damage * damage damage disconnect * disconnected ...
20. Code walkthrough https://bitbucket.org/sbarysiuk/topconf-dots
21. Deploying the app... • Your own server • PaaS: appfog.com, cloudfoundry.com, heroku.com, etc. • nodejitsu.com, supports web sockets
22. Questions? Email: serge@propellerz.com Twitter: @sbarysiuk