

Ask HN: What is the Current State of HTML5 WebSockets? - gpmcadam

I&#x27;ve loosely tracked the development of HTML5 WebSockets from its inception to, what I understood to be, its eventual decline.<p>My question is, what is the current state of WebSockets? Is it basically dead? And if so, what are my options for developing a real-time web application?
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yzzxy
WebSockets was used for the recent Unumbered Sparks installation at TED in
Vancouver. People below the sculpture could connect to a local access point on
their phones and control lighting and color from a phone web view in their
browser (http requests were redirect to the webapp a la login page)

I had the chance to try the sculpture and the projection was extremely
responsive, the delay was not very noticeable even moving from phone > access
point > renderer on a chrome instance > projector. I'm not sure how indicative
of the general development progress this is, but the API seemed very capable.

There's more implementation info on the webpage:

[http://www.unnumberedsparks.com/](http://www.unnumberedsparks.com/)

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sigvef
WebSockets are more or less ubiquitously supported [1]. Still, for
compatibility and ease of development, your best bet for real-time web is to
use SockJS [2], which wraps WebSockets and other transports.

[1]:
[http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets](http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets)
[2]: [https://github.com/sockjs/sockjs-
client](https://github.com/sockjs/sockjs-client)

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EdwardTaylor
I believe websockets are still very much alive and popular (at least I hope
so, I'm using them!).

I actually use socket.io [http://socket.io/](http://socket.io/) , which not
only makes websockets easy to use (accommodating a few different frameworks, I
use node), but provides support for old browsers by selecting a real-time
transport that works, be it flash, ajax polling etc.

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elwell
Not dead at all. I just saw Disqus using them a few days ago for realtime
votes updates.

