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Reliable Software Tech Talk: Bi-directional Communication for Web Services with WebSocket & Socket.io


Web services provide a standard format for communications to support machine-to-machine interactions throughout a network that is scalable, simple and distributed. The traditional HTTP Request-Response Model required more human intervention and lacked the capabilities for real-time, automated responses. Today, tools like WebSocket are helping address these shortcomings through server-initiated requests and location-based apps enabling the server to push real-time changes.                             

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So, how can WebSocket help improve on HTTP’s bi-directional communication capabilities?

WebSocket offers a standing bi-directional communication channel between client and server on a single TCP connection to allow subsequent messages to be transmitted in real time. At any time, this communications channel is mutually beneficial for both the client and the server. This two-way communication works by:

  1. Opening and establishing a connection between client and server
  2. Facilitating an ongoing message exchange between the two
  3. Closing the connection

To simplify the use of WebSocket, Socket.io was introduced which resolves the failovers in the protocol that WebSocket doesn’t support out of the box. Moreover, Socket.io also adds features like—rooms, heartbeats, timeouts, disconnection support and more.

Eventually, HTTP, WebSocket and Socket.io are all interconnected with each other to build modern APIs via underlying concurrent communication protocols. WebSocket is also encrypted to protect against security concerns. Chat applications and social media platforms, are some of the examples of Websockets and Socket.io. At Reliable Software, we make use of Socket.io for a variety of notification, logging and chat modules as part of our web service solutions.

To learn more about how you could improve bi-directional communications through web services, contact us today.           

  

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