Dart Nodejs and Socketio

Question

What are my options for converting a socketio nodejs application to dart? Is there support for nodejs servers using dart somehow (ideally with all the fancy debugging capabilities of the dart editor)? Does socketio have a dart based library?

Answer 1

Dart has a server side VM, just like V8 has a server side VM in the form of node.js.

Take a look at Adam Smith's webserver chat sample, which uses websockets on the server side to communicate with websockets on the client side, with both parts being written in Dart.

The key parts for the server side look like:

import "dart:io";

main() {
  HttpServer server = new HttpServer();

  WebSocketHandler wsHandler = new WebSocketHandler();
  server.addRequestHandler((req) => req.path == "/ws", wsHandler.onRequest);

  wsHandler.onOpen = (WebSocketConnection conn) {
     conn.onMessage = (message) {
       print(message);
       conn.send("hello, this is the server");
     };
  };

  server.listen("127.0.0.1",8080);
}

Then on the client, something like

import "dart:html"; 
main() {
  var ws = new WebSocket("ws://127.0.0.1:8080/ws");
  ws.on.open.add( (a) {
    ws.send("hello, this is the client");
  });
  ws.on.message.add( (messsage) {
    print(message);
  });
}