Differences between socket.io and websockets
firebug, google-chrome, node.js, socket.io, websocket
Solution
Its advantages are that it simplifies the usage of WebSockets as you described in #2, and probably more importantly it provides fail-overs to other protocols in the event that WebSockets are not supported on the browser or server. I would avoid using WebSockets directly unless you are very familiar with what environments they don't work and you are capable of working around those limitations.
This is a good read on both WebSockets and Socket.IO.
http://davidwalsh.name/websocket
Problem
What are the differences between socket.io and websockets in node.js? Are they both server push technologies? The only differences I felt was, socket.io allowed me to send/emit messages by specifying an event name. In the case of socket.io a message from server will reach on all clients, but for the same in websockets I was forced to keep an array of all connections and loop through it to send messages to all clients. Also, I wonder why web inspectors (like Chrome/firebug/fiddler) are unable to catch these messages (from socket.io/websocket) from server? Please clarify this.