Summary

In this chapter we've gone over three of the major strategies employed when building real-time applications: AJAX, WebSocket, and SSE. We've shown that non-trivial collaborative applications can be developed with very little code by using Node. We've also seen how some of these strategies enable the modeling of client/server communication as an evented data stream interface. We've considered the pros and cons of these various techniques, and we've gone through some clear examples of the best places to use each one.

Additionally, we've shown how client identifiers and state date can be built and managed within a Node server, such that state changes can be safely encapsulated in a central location and broadcasted out to many connected clients safely and predictably. Demonstrating the quality of the modules being developed with the Node community, we created a collaborative code editing system through the use of operational transformation.

In the next chapter we will be looking at how...