Lightweight alternative to socket.io for transport only

node.js, socket.io, websocket

Solution

The ws module is amazingly fast (look at the benchmarks), well tested, very very very lightweight, but with no you would have to do the fall-backs yourself, plus, it doesn't have an event emitter on top of it. But it's amazing at transporting only, if that's what you want. If you want a poor man's "session", just attach something to the ws object, like this:

var WebSocketServer = require('ws').Server
var wss = new WebSocketServer( /* some config */);
wss.on('connection', function(ws) {
    ws.on('message', function (message) {
        try {
            var obj = JSON.parse(message) // using JSON  over the conversation
        } catch (err) {
            var obj = {};
            console.log('probably not valid json');
        }
        switch (true) {
            case obj.name !== undefined:
                ws.name = obj.name; // Here's the poor man's session variable
                ws.send('Hello '+ws.name);
            break;
        }
    });
});

Now the only thing missing would be an event emitter on top of it...

Problem

Is there a lightweight alternative to socket.io for transport only? I have an node.js application that uses socket.io simply as an message transport. My application is managing sessions and message routing on its own, I am simply using socket.io for transport -- websocket + whatever the default fallback is for older browsers. The newer version of socket.io seems to get heavier and heavier, now comes with redis support, which I totally do not need.

Original source