sockjs/sockjs-client

sockjs/sockjs-client

SockJS family:

• SockJS-client JavaScript client library
• SockJS-node Node.js server
• SockJS-erlang Erlang server
• SockJS-lua Lua/Luvit server
• SockJS-tornado Python/Tornado server
• vert.x Java/vert.x server

Work in progress:

• SockJS-ruby
• SockJS-netty
• SockJS-gevent
• pyramid-SockJS
• wildcloud-websockets

SockJS-client

SockJS is a browser JavaScript library that provides a WebSocket-like
object. SockJS gives you a coherent, cross-browser, Javascript API
which creates a low latency, full duplex, cross-domain communication
channel between the browser and the web server.

Under the hood SockJS tries to use native WebSockets first. If that
fails it can use a variety of browser-specific transport protocols and
presents them through WebSocket-like abstractions.

SockJS is intended to work for all modern browsers and in environments
which don't support WebSocket protcol, for example behind restrictive
corporate proxies.

SockJS-client does require a server counterpart:

• SockJS-node is a SockJS
  server for Node.js.

Philosophy:

• The API should follow
  HTML5 Websockets API as
  closely as possible.
• All the transports must support cross domain connections out of the
  box. It's possible and recommended to host SockJS server on
  different server than your main web site.
• There is a support for at least one streaming protocol for every
  major browser.
• Streaming transports should work cross-domain and
  should support cookies (for cookie-based sticky sessions).
• Polling transports are be used as a fallback for old browsers and
  hosts behind restrictive proxies.
• Connection establishment should be fast and lightweight.
• No Flash inside (no need to open port 843 - which doesn't work
  through proxies, no need to host 'crossdomain.xml', no need
  to wait for 3 seconds
  in order to detect problems)

Subscribe to
SockJS mailing list for
discussions and support.

Live QUnit tests and smoke tests

SockJS comes with some QUnit tests and a few smoke tests (using
SockJS-node on the server
side). At the moment they are deployed in few places:

• http://sockjs.popcnt.org/ and https://sockjs.popcnt.org/ (hosted in Europe)
• http://sockjs.cloudfoundry.com/ (CloudFoundry, websockets disabled, loadbalanced)
• https://sockjs.cloudfoundry.com/ (CloudFoundry SSL, websockets disabled, loadbalanced)

Example

SockJS mimics WebSockets API
but instead of WebSocket there is a SockJS Javascript object.

First, you need to load SockJS JavaScript library, for example you can
put that in your http head:

<script src="http://cdn.sockjs.org/sockjs-0.3.min.js">
  </script>

After the script is loaded you can establish a connection with the
SockJS server. Here's a simple example:

<script>
   var sock = new SockJS('http://mydomain.com/my_prefix');
   sock.onopen = function() {
       console.log('open');
   };
   sock.onmessage = function(e) {
       console.log('message', e.data);
   };
   sock.onclose = function() {
       console.log('close');
   };
</script>

SockJS-client API

SockJS class

Similar to 'WebSocket' class 'SockJS' constructor takes one, or more arguments:

var sockjs = new SockJS(url, _reserved, options);

Where options is a hash which can contain:

• debug (boolean)

  Print some debugging messages using 'console.log'.

• devel (boolean)

  Development mode. Currently setting it disables caching of the
  'iframe.html'.

• protocols_whitelist (list of strings)

  Sometimes it is useful to disable some fallback protocols. This
  option allows you to supply a list protocols that may be used by
  SockJS. By default all available protocols will be used, which is
  equivalent to supplying: "['websocket', 'xdr-streaming', 'xhr-streaming',
  'iframe-eventsource', 'iframe-htmlfile', 'xdr-polling', 'xhr-polling',
  'iframe-xhr-polling', 'jsonp-polling']"

Although the 'SockJS' object tries to emulate the 'WebSocket'
behaviour, it's impossible to support all features. One of the
important SockJS limitations is the fact that you're not allowed to
open more than one SockJS connection to a single domain at a time.
This limitation is caused by a in-browser limit of outgoing
connections - usually browsers don't allow opening more than two
outgoing connections to a single domain. Single SockJS session
requires those two connections - one for downloading data, other for
sending messages. Opening second SockJS session at the same time
would most probably block and can result in both sessions timing out.

Opening more than one SockJS connection at a time is generally a
bad practice. If you absolutely must do it, you can use
mutliple subdomains, using different subdomain for every
SockJS connection.

Supported transports, by browser (html served from http:// or https://)

Browser	Websockets	Streaming	Polling
IE 6, 7	no	no	jsonp-polling
IE 8, 9 (cookies=no)	no	xdr-streaming †	xdr-polling †
IE 8, 9 (cookies=yes)	no	iframe-htmlfile	iframe-xhr-polling
IE 10	rfc6455	xhr-streaming	xhr-polling
Chrome 6-13	hixie-76	xhr-streaming	xhr-polling
Chrome 14+	hybi-10 / rfc6455	xhr-streaming	xhr-polling
Firefox <10	no ‡	xhr-streaming	xhr-polling
Firefox 10+	hybi-10 / rfc6455	xhr-streaming	xhr-polling
Safari 5	hixie-76	xhr-streaming	xhr-polling
Opera 10.70+	no ‡	iframe-eventsource	iframe-xhr-polling
Konqueror	no	no	jsonp-polling

• †: IE 8+ supports XDomainRequest, which is
  esentially a modified AJAX/XHR that can do requests across
  domains. But unfortunately it doesn't send any cookies, which
  makes it inaproppriate for deployments when the load balancer uses
  JSESSIONID cookie to do sticky sessions.

• ‡: Firefox 4.0 and Opera 11.00 and shipped with disabled
  Websockets "hixie-76". They can still be enabled by manually
  changing a browser setting.

Supported transports, by browser (html served from file://)

Sometimes you may want to serve your html from "file://" address - for
development or if you're using PhoneGap or similar technologies. But
due to the Cross Origin Policy files served from "file://" have no
Origin, and that means some of SockJS transports won't work. For this
reason the SockJS protocol table is different than usually, major
differences are:

Browser	Websockets	Streaming	Polling
IE 8, 9	same as above	iframe-htmlfile	iframe-xhr-polling
Other	same as above	iframe-eventsource	iframe-xhr-polling

Supported transports, by name

Transport	References
websocket (rfc6455)	rfc 6455
websocket (hixie-76)	draft-hixie-thewebsocketprotocol-76
websocket (hybi-10)	draft-ietf-hybi-thewebsocketprotocol-10
xhr-streaming	Transport using Cross domain XHR streaming capability (readyState=3).
xdr-streaming	Transport using XDomainRequest streaming capability (readyState=3).
iframe-eventsource	EventSource used from an iframe via postMessage.
iframe-htmlfile	HtmlFile used from an iframe via postMessage.
xhr-polling	Long-polling using cross domain XHR.
xdr-polling	Long-polling using XDomainRequest.
iframe-xhr-polling	Long-polling using normal AJAX from an iframe via postMessage.
jsonp-polling	Slow and old fashioned JSONP polling. This transport will show "busy indicator" (aka: "spinning wheel") when sending data.

Connecting to SockJS without the client

Although the main point of SockJS it to enable browser-to-server
connectivity, it is possible to connect to SockJS from an external
application. Any SockJS server complying with 0.3 protocol does
support a raw WebSocket url. The raw WebSocket url for the test server
looks like:

• ws://localhost:8081/echo/websocket

You can connect any WebSocket RFC 6455 compliant WebSocket client to
this url. This can be a command line client, external application,
third party code or even a browser (though I don't know why you would
want to do so).

Deployment

In order to utilize best performance you should use the SockJS-client
releases hosted on SockJS CDN. You should use a version of sockjs-client
that supports the protocol used by your server. For example:

<script src="http://cdn.sockjs.org/sockjs-0.3.min.js">
  </script>

A list of files hosted on a CDN is available here: http://sockjs.github.com/sockjs-client/ .

You can also use or CDN via https (using Cloud Front domain name):

<script src="https://d1fxtkz8shb9d2.cloudfront.net/sockjs-0.3.js">
  </script>

For server-side deployment tricks, especially about load balancing and
session stickiness, take a look at the
SockJS-node readme.

Development and testing

SockJS-client needs Node.js for running a test
server and JavaScript minification. If you want to work on
SockJS-client source code, check out the git repo and follow this
steps:

cd sockjs-client
npm install --dev

To generate JavaScript run:

make sockjs.js

To generate minified JavaScript run:

make sockjs.min.js

(To generate both run make build.)

Testing

Once you compiled SockJS-client you may want to check if your changes
pass all the tests. To run the tests you need a server that can answer
various SockJS requests. A common way is to use SockJS-node test
server for that. To run it (by default it will be listening on port 8081):

cd sockjs-node
npm install --dev
make build
make test_server

At this point you're ready to run a SockJS-client server that will
server your freshly compiled JavaScript and various static http and
javscript files (by default it will run on port 8080).

cd sockjs-client
make test

At that point you should have two web servers running: sockjs-node on
8081 and sockjs-client on 8080. When you open the browser on
http://localhost:8080/ you should be able
run the QUnit tests against your sockjs-node server.

If you look at your browser console you will see warnings like that:

Incompatibile SockJS! Main site uses: "a", the iframe: "b".

This is due to a fact that SockJS-node test server is using compiled
javascript from CDN, rather than your freshly compiled version. To fix
that you must amend sockjs_url that is used by SockJS-node test
server. Edit the config.js file:

vim sockjs-node/examples/test_server/config.js

And replace sockjs_url setting which by default points to CDN:

sockjs_url: 'http://cdn.sockjs.org/sockjs-0.3.min.js',

to a freshly compiled sockjs, for example:

sockjs_url: 'http://localhost:8080/lib/sockjs.js',

Also, if you want to run tests agains SockJS server not running on
localhost:8081 you may want to edit the
tests/config.js
file.

Additionally, if you're doing more serious development consider using
make serve, which will automatically reload the server when you
modify the source code.

Browser Quirks

There are various browser quirks which we don't intend to address:

• Pressing ESC in Firefox closes SockJS connection. For a workaround
  and discussion see #18.
• Jsonp-polling transport will show a "spinning wheel" (aka. "busy indicator")
  when sending data.
• You can't open more than one SockJS connection to one domain at the
  same time due to the browsers limit of consurrent connections
  (this limit is not counting native websockets connections).
• Although SockJS is trying to escape any strange Unicode characters
  (even invalid ones - like surrogates \xD800-\xDBFF or \xFFFE and \xFFFF)
  it's advisable to use only valid characters. Using invalid
  characters is a bit slower, and may not work with SockJS servers
  that have a proper Unicode support.
• Having a global function called onmessage or such is probably a
  bad idea, as it could be called by the built-in postMessage API.
• From SockJS point of view there is nothing special about
  SSL/HTTPS. Connecting between unencrypted and encrypted sites
  should work just fine.
• Although SockJS does best to support both prefix and cookie based
  sticky sessions, the latter may not work well cross-domain with
  browsers that don't accept third-party cookies by default (Safari).
  In order to get around this make sure you're connecting to sockjs
  from the same parent domain as the main site. For example
  'sockjs.a.com' is able to set cookies if you're connecting from
  'www.a.com' or 'a.com'.
• Trying to connect from secure "https://" to insecure "http://" is
  not good idea. The other way around should be fine.
• Long polling is known to cause problems on Heroku, but
  workaround for SockJS is available.