Web Sockets

Chapter 18 showed how client-side JavaScript code can communicate over the network. The examples in that chapter all used HTTP, which means that they were all constrained by the fundamental nature of the HTTP: it is a stateless protocol that consists of client requests and server responses. HTTP is actually a fairly specialized network protocol. More general network connections over the Internet (or over local intranets) often involve longer-lived connections and bidirectional message exchange over TCP sockets. It is not safe to give untrusted client-side JavaScript code access to low-level TCP sockets, but the WebSocket API defines a secure alternative: it allows client-side code to create bidirectional socket-type connections to servers that support the WebSocket protocol. This makes it much easier to perform certain kinds of networking tasks.

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