Ask HN: What is the Current State of HTML5 WebSockets?

7 points·gpmcadam··4 comments

I've loosely tracked the development of HTML5 WebSockets from its inception to, what I understood to be, its eventual decline.

My question is, what is the current state of WebSockets? Is it basically dead? And if so, what are my options for developing a real-time web application?

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WebSockets was used for the recent Unumbered Sparks installation at TED in Vancouver. People below the sculpture could connect to a local access point on their phones and control lighting and color from a phone web view in their browser (http requests were redirect to the webapp a la login page)

I had the chance to try the sculpture and the projection was extremely responsive, the delay was not very noticeable even moving from phone > access point > renderer on a chrome instance > projector. I'm not sure how indicative of the general development progress this is, but the API seemed very capable.

There's more implementation info on the webpage:

http://www.unnumberedsparks.com/

WebSockets are more or less ubiquitously supported [1]. Still, for compatibility and ease of development, your best bet for real-time web is to use SockJS [2], which wraps WebSockets and other transports.

[1]: http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets [2]: https://github.com/sockjs/sockjs-client

I believe websockets are still very much alive and popular (at least I hope so, I'm using them!).

I actually use socket.io http://socket.io/ , which not only makes websockets easy to use (accommodating a few different frameworks, I use node), but provides support for old browsers by selecting a real-time transport that works, be it flash, ajax polling etc.

Not dead at all. I just saw Disqus using them a few days ago for realtime votes updates.

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