socket.io: The good parts, and the bad parts

Question

I have discovered socket.io recently, and it seems to fit perfectly my needs for a multiplayer game. From what I understand, it serves the same role for communications between client and server that jQuery does for client-side querying and animations. Is that roughly correct?

The official website is kind of informative, and I've found a few blog posts, such as this one, boasting how awesome it is. However, I've found no Wikipedia article describing it, no news items, no scholarly research, etc. So, how popular is it?

Somewhat surprising, I have not been able to people complaining about its bad parts, apart from (understandable) bugs like this. For some reason I haven't found comments about how fast it is, how buggy it is, how complete it is, etc.

I would like to know what I'm getting into before diving in and learning the technology!

Answer 1

Note: My opinion is biased because I work on Socket.IO

We have the http://socket.io site and some wiki pages on github (https://github.com/learnboost/socket.io/wiki). It's not allot of information, but enough to get your started.

I think the main reason why there isn't that much information yet is because node and socket.io are relatively young. But it's really populair in the node.js community, when you want realtime communication socket.io is usually the first module that is suggest to you.

According to the stats of npm (node package manager) it's quite populair http://search.npmjs.org/ as it's in the list of most depended on modules. Also if you checkout the stats on the repositories on github you can see that it's quite active and loved. The server has more than 2000+ watchers and 220+ forks. And the client 1300+ watchers and 110+ forks. The google groups has 1350 members already. So that is not to bad for one single node.js module (if i may say so).

As for the bugs, we have launched a complete rewrite of the code a couple of months ago, incorporating the lessons and feedback we had on Socket.IO 0.6, so there a few leaks and bugs but we are working on hard on resolving those. I have already fixed most of the known memory leaks and they should hopefully land in socket.io 0.7.8 / 0.8.

Hopes this helps <3