How to integrate SockJS with another web framework

Question

As an alternative to Socket.io, there is SockJS (https://github.com/sockjs/sockjs-client), which seems to be better maintained and more stable than Socket.io.

This question is about the conceptual understanding the architecture of using SockJS with a web framework, say, for building a chat application

My current understanding is that you need the SockJS-client and a SocketJS server (in my case, I intend to use SockJS-Tornado (https://github.com/MrJoes/sockjs-tornado)) to be able to make websockets-style communication.

But how does SockJS (SockJS-client + SockJS-Tornado) tie together with a web framework that does the rest of the work (e.g. serving the page, writing/reading to/from db, etc). For instance, how would SockJS-Tornado component communicates with the web server of the framework? In particular, any direction of doing this with web2py (a python web framework) is highly appreciated.

Answer 1

You're right, for SockJS you need a sockjs-capable server and a in-browser javascript client library.

There are generally two integration patterns, let's say you want to use sockjs-tornado:

1. You may have all your site served from Tornado. With that, hook sockjs-tornado to some path, for example 'http://mysite.com/sockjs'. In this scenario both your website and sockjs will be served from mysite.com domain.
2. You may keep your site in whatever language/framework it's written and add sockjs-serveras another compontent, under a different domain, like. 'http://sockjs.mysite.com/sockjs'.

Additionally, you may use any variation of this - for example: have two servers internally but expose them as one domain by using a smart loadblancer (like haproxy).