Communicating with WebSockets

HTTP was not made for the kind of real-time applications that many developers are creating today. As a result, all sorts of workarounds have been discovered to mimic the idea of bidirectional, uninterrupted communication between servers and clients.

WebSockets don't mimic this behavior; they provide it.

In this recipe, we will use the third-party ws module to create a pure WebSocket server that will receive and respond to WebSocket requests from the browser.

Getting ready

Let's create a new folder called websocket-app with a server.js file, plus a folder called public, containing an index.html file:

$ mkdir websocket-app 
$ cd websocket-app 
$ touch server.js 
$ mkdir public 
$ touch public/index.html

We also need to initialize our app as a Node package, and install the ws module:

$ npm init -y 
$ npm install --save ws

How to do it...

In server.js, let's begin by requiring our dependencies:

const http = require('http') 
const fs = require('fs') 
const ws = require('ws...