Socket.io VS Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI)

We need to add socket.io to our project:

Create a node app, and use npm to add express and socket.io. Express handles the regular API endpoints, socket io handles websockets.

The switch wasn't that bad. We migrated a smaller Vue 2 and used Element Plus for the UI. We ran into problems with Vite since it requires ES modules for all your libs. We ended up ditching moment, axios, and sockjs and replaced them with dayjs, VueUse useFetch() and socket.io to make Vite happy. What we did was manually copy over one component at a time and rewrote any mixins as composition API functions. The large app took me a month to rewrite and we used Quasar for that after popular demand from the dev team. We standardized around the script setup syntax since it is cleaner to follow than plain setup().

I would probably set up a separate socket.io server for the real-time functionality, but load all the chat data for each page like you normally would from the database in +page.server.js load functions. The websocket server would then handle all the real-time stuff in the client after the initial data is loaded. This would allow you to still take full advantage of SSR.

Socket.io is the best Node.js server and web framework for creating real-time web applications. It enables event-based communication between the Node.js server and the browser. Socket.IO acts as a backend library for Node.js and as a frontend library in the browser.

After reading a couple articles and watching some tutorial videos, we realised that dealing with WebRTC natively is quite cumbersome. Due to this, PeerJS came handy to abstract away some configurations around WebRTC. While implementing peer-to-peer communication, there must be a signalling server for the purpose of keeping in sync the state/-s (muted, camera is off and etc.) between peers. Therefore, SocketIO played a role of signalling server. Basic authentication layer was integrated via Auth0 to implement certain features.

As of socket.io version 4.4.0 there is now built in support for acknowledgement timeouts. We pass a timeout argument of 30000 milliseconds (30 seconds) which will throw an error if our server does not send back an acknowledgement within that time period. If the timeout it hit, the leaveRoom() function will disconnect the socket and redirect the user back to the login page where they can try to join again.

For socket.io handling i use package gosf-socketio, when recieving a call from client i get channel struct and only available thing to use is .Request() which returns http.Request type.

import express from "express"; import { createServer } from "http"; import { Server } from "socket.io";

Socket.io is one of the best cross-browser JavaScript library that provides event-driven communication capabilities for use in real-time applications. It allows bi-directional communication between client and server. Bi-directional communications are enabled when a client has Socket.IO in the browser, and a server has also integrated the Socket.IO package.

At the time of writing this article, there is a bug in MAUI that has existed since Xamarin.Forms where photos taken from iOS do not respect the device orientation, or record that information in the EXIF data, and thus they can end up incorrectly rotated.

It doesn't seem like it if you look at MAUI's contributors for the last month: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/pulse/monthly

There is a 3rd party providing this with custom templates and a the team thinks it is a good idea: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/12716

There's a github issue on maui on tracking that. The overall advantage is that the programming model for Razor is pretty straightforward and it should make it easier for those who know Blazor from the web side to use a purely native MAUI target instead of Blazor Hybrid, the onboarding experience should be pretty similar to React Native vs React web.

My project runs w/o errors and renders a simple index page in browser via controller set up in project, and I've also added a mobile auth controller based on this repo. What I'm now stuck on is trying to connect my backend with my .NET maui framework so that I can have a page such as the one below, and then the buttons on the screen link to authentication service I've built out in backend. Any suggestions/resources/guidance is appreciated, this is my first mobile dev project + my first project in general where I have to start w/ nothing.

Official MS documentation GitHub of maui

I'd say Razor is pretty good. Hence for purely native targets I hope Blazor Mobile Bindings takes off. There's a github issue that I'm tracking regarding it. It's basically using Razor but instead of web UI you build the UI tree using Razor components instead.

It’s coming to .NET MAUI. Check this out: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/12009

At least according to the official repo, it's not there yet: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/10564

If you limit your target to windows the unpackaged apps option from the link bellow should help: Maui unpackaged apps