primus

Indeed it does! https://github.com/primus/primus/blob/a7ba7249cb0205a01629da... I do wish we didn't all have to reinvent this wheel though…

Socket.io can't handle many connections you're right. I would use (universal) Web Sockets (This is a good abstraction library, very easy to implement). https://github.com/primus/primus Maybe put it on a Digitalocean Server and just reference your Dyno's IP address if possible.

I think part problem is also that many programmers tend to gravitate towards abstraction and reusable code before there is a clear need for it. Just today I read about this project https://github.com/primus/primus and it's a point in case. A "universal wrapper for real-time frameworks" with the main benefit being "Effortless switching between real-time frameworks by changing one single line of code." Because clearly, I often need to switch between WebSockets and BrowserChannel... or wait, do I?

Take a look at https://github.com/primus/primus.

Feathers also supports Primus (https://github.com/primus/primus) so you can a bunch of other socket transports.

Consider using Primus [1] instead of socket.io, backed with either ws or sockjs. [1] https://github.com/primus/primus

SockJS is definitely a reasonable choice as a base. At Pusher we use a fork of SockJS for HTTP fallback but we actually use em-websocket [1] (ruby) for our WebSocket API. Given the opportunity we'd probably move away from SockJS to something much simpler because we only want the HTTP fallback part and it only handles < 8% of our connections. If you _only_ want WebSocket connections with no HTTP fallback then Faye WebSocket [2] may be an option. But any production application is going to require fallback for older browsers and pesky proxies/firewalls. Faye [3] is solid (obviously used Faye WebSocket), has implementations in Node and Ruby, but is a PubSub solution. I'd kinda argue that any real-time app needs at least PubSub functionality anyway. The ws Node module [4] is apparently "The fastest RFC-6455 WebSocket implementation for Node.js

Absolutely! I've had terrible experiences with vanilla socket.io regarding reconnections, performance, and reliability. This is even after the 1.0 release. Lately, I've been using primus [1], which is an API unification layer for socket.io, sockjs, faye, and native websockets. Swapping one engine for another is trivial, and they've taken pains to abstract a core subset of functionality. [1] https://github.com/primus/primus

Seems like it is. We use nwjs with lot of files + sqlite3[1] + bluetooth + http + child synchronization for tasks in other languages[2]. It works well, scale well, is cross-platform with changing very few of the application code (the build process is quite complex, thought). Also, building an html with bootstrap, eventually with the chrome developer tools, takes agility to a whole new level when we speak about desktop applications. [1] With http://bookshelfjs.org/ but http://sequelizejs.com/ is better in most cases [2] With https://github.com/primus/primus we spawn watchdogs which run processes (via http://nodejs.org/api/child_process.html). It's very effective.

Congrats for the release, but i will keep using https://github.com/primus/primus. No module lock-in! Yes i'm a bit biased.

You could also just use Primus which exposes a Stream compatible wrapper by default for the client and server. https://github.com/primus/primus (Primus uses engine.io,sockjs,browserchannel,websockets internally so you're no longer locked into a specific framework)

i'd suggest https://github.com/primus/primus. it's an abstraction layer for real-time so no lock-in to a single socket implementation. it's simple and extensible by plugins.

Indeed. And Primus is nice if you want fallbacks and additional features (like reconnects with randomized exponential back-off). https://github.com/primus/primus