Socket.io VS SocketCluster

What do you use socket.io for? I mean, you can just use Supabase realtime features, right?

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";

The two best lightweight solutions I have worked with are SocketCluster and NATS. SocketCluster is used to build out a custom backend that scales very well. NATS would be used as a central pub/sub system. If you need queueing, you'll need to add additional services like Redis.

At the time of writing, SocketCluster has almost 6k stars on GitHub and 7k downloads on npm weekly,

SocketCluster is a highly scalable framework and a real-time HTTP server engine that enables you to build multi-process, real-time servers using all of the available CPU cores at once. With SocketCluster, the backend avoids running the Node.js server as a single thread, working more efficiently and remaining resilient.

SocketCluster is a framework which allows you to use the WebSocket protocol the transmit between its backend API and client library. The client can be used both on a backend (E.g. a Raspberry pi) or frontend application.