Socket.io

General usage

Online consumers now demand immediacy in on-platform communication. This has forced a shift away from delayed email/inbox messages to instantaneous chat messaging. Socket is the tool to make that happen.

It uses JavaScript libraries and an event-driven architecture to connect browsers and Node.js servers. Code-sharing between the browser and server offers better compatibility, easier implementation, and reduces maintenance and chances for errors.

Socket also offers great performance through its use of Websockets which enables interaction between a web browser and web server with lower overhead than HTTP.

By falling back to HTTP, when Websockets are not available, it offers strong reliability. It’s also highly scalable as it can be expanded to multiple servers.

Other super-useful features of Socket :

• It does automated browser testing.
• It enables broadcasting to all users or to a subset of users, e.g. notifications that a new user has joined a chat room.
• It handles live connection detection and automatic reconnection.
• It doesn’t get disrupted by proxies and load balancers.

Outside of chat applications, Socket can also be used for real-time analytics, binary streaming, document collaboration, social feeds, and multiplayer online gaming.

Popularity

Socket has shown rapid growth among the world’s top ten thousand sites:

Source: Builtwith

Marketplace benefits

CobbleWeb offers its clients custom messaging systems that support their specific marketplace user flows. Our messaging solutions cater for real-time user-to-user messaging, chat rooms, as well as system messages and automatic notifications.

IHSS Connect, a healthcare marketplace, required an instant messaging feature so that care recipients could discuss confidential information anonymously with potential care providers before shortlisting them.

CobbleWeb used Socket to build an asynchronous real-time messaging system that supports group chats, integration with CRMs like Salesforce, and sharing multimedia files, e.g. spreadsheets, PDFs, images and videos. It also includes auto-generated messages that notify care recipients of new care provider applications.