Flash Bridged Web Sockets in Node

Many people are talking about how to use websockets and where they are supported. Luckily we can use a Flash substitute in cased that they are not natively in Javascript. In this post I will create a small example of using this fallback technique. Our example will be a simple publish/submission chat.

For the example we are going to create we will need a few things:

• node >= 0.1.100
• http://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js
• http://github.com/miksago/node-websocket-server (npm websocket-server)
• http://github.com/senchalabs/Connect/ (npm connect)
• a port to serve files on (8000 in our example)
• port 843 on the server

Note:

• Flash websockets will not be active until the SWF is loaded, either wait for an onload or test other ways to see if the WebSocket interface is ready.
• IE 64-bit does not support Flash as of the time of this post.

Websocket Client:

web-socket-js has a sample.html file which will serve as our example of a simple publication/subscription service client. It requires WebSocketMain.swf , swfobject.js , web_socket.js , and FABridge.js . All the browser will have to do to get to this is direct to this page from HTTP:// (Flash Sockets will not work on FILE://)

The only modifications to this file that we need to do are where the WebSocket(url) is going.

• If you move WebSocketMain.swf be sure to set WEB_SOCKET_SWF_LOCATION
• You can remove WEB_SOCKET_DEBUG if you do not want messages in your console

Websocket Server:

Our server needs to do 3 things:

1. Serve the files we want to make up our client
2. Accept websocket connections
3. Serve a policy file using TCP (Not HTTP://!)

To see all of these in action download:

http://github.com/nodejsbot/flash-websocket-example