Questions regarding our WebSockets API bridge (shared)

Yesterday after I published the blog post regarding the WebSockets API bridge (A Silverlight (HTML5) WebSockets bridge up and running!) I got a few questions via email and telephone, as we care so much about WebSockets we share those here.

Q:  What protocol versions does the bridge support?

A: It supports and runs (tested) on –75,-76 (aka draft-ietf-hybi-thewebsocketprotocol-00)  version of the protocol.  As the WebSocket Server of our also deals with “regular-sockets” , we are also able to run those.

Q: How about Mac?

Hmm, yes, as we have been doing this for a while, we have of course made tests at the Mac platform,  Safari for Mac as well as iPhone and iPad do support native WebSockets, it also deals with the Silverlight 4 runtime. So it is not an issue.  We also started the work on a Flash bridge and it is in progress.

Q: The performance of the bridge versus the native WebSockets API?

A: We can see a slight decrease in performance on communication-intensive Websockets implementations (client side)

Q: If we do not run Silverlight?

A: If you don’t run Silverlight or have a WebSocket compliant browser such as Google Chrome , Safari , then you cant use WebSockets , we are working with a Flash bridge ( se above) . There is still options, Of course, you can he a AJAX (http) case back to your real-time web application? But it will not be bi-directional nor as fast as the WebSockets API / Silverlight bridge solution.

Q: Tell me more about the Silverlight bridge, how does it work?

A: Yes, hmm.. It is quite simple, it is a proxy/bridge running at the Silverlight runtime, I consists of a simple JS API that contains a few events, onmessage, onopen,onclose (as WebSockets API) a method for sending (.send(sting)), the JavaScript API, detects and also gives the opportunity to add event handlers to the WebSocket-Message-objects, as well as triggering those events.  Our WebSocket server and its belonging WebSocketHandlers has a Message objects that looks like this (JSON)

 var sampleMessage =
                    {
                        event: "MyEvent",
                        data:
                        [
                            {
                                MyEventArgumentString: "Hello WebSockets everywhere!",
                                MyEventArgumentInt: 1,
                                MyEventAgumenttBoolean: false
                            }
                        ]
                    };

By using he JavaScript API, you bind event handlers are to those object (messages) by using i.e  myWebSocket.bind(“MyEvent”,fn) no matter if you use native or bridged-Websockets using Silverlight

This is pretty much the concept

 

Magnus