High performance realtime client/server for browsers and node.js.
Net.io provides a high performance networking system, operating primarily over WebSockets and falling back to non-WebSocket connections when WebSockets are unavailable. It is designed to be very easy to use and has an API that is similar to socket.io but with a massively reduced code base.
Net.io has both a server (written for Node.js) and a client that will operate in all browsers and is also compatible with JavaScript mobile native wrappers like CocoonJS where there is no access to the DOM.
Socket.io is a great library for applications like chat and others that do not need to count every byte as precious. Socket.io also has built-in support for "channels" which makes sense when writing a chat-centric networking system.
Net.io is tailored more towards realtime gaming and high-performance apps that need to squeeze all the bandwidth out of a connection that they can. Net.io reduces network overhead by intelligently encoding packets instead of adding to the data that a packet contains. Socket.io pads every packet with extra data that it uses to determine the type of message you are sending etc, this leads to wasted bytes in your network traffic for high-performance apps.
When you send a data message using Net.io, you know for a fact that the underlying Net.io system has not added any extra padding or bytes to your message. Instead Net.io will send your message exactly as you defined it, except where Net.io detects that it can reduce your message size further with extra encoding.
The Socket.io client also requires access to the DOM whereas Net.io can run in a non-DOM environment which is important for connecting from other Node.js instances and in situations where a DOM is not available such as JS wrapper systems.
Net.io was written by Irrelon Software Limited for use with the Isogenic Game Engine (http://www.isogenicengine.com) and made open-source so that others can benefit from a high-performance network library designed for realtime gaming.
- Encoding is currently only to standard JSON stringify, next level will encode frequently used strings into integers
- Add origin accept/reject system for tighter security
- Add more socket types than just websockets for graceful fallback
- Publish as an NPM module
- Create better documentation, currently only documentation is the included examples
Copyright (c) 2012 Irrelon Software Limited
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