CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mysqlnode.jsgoogle-app-enginegoogle-cloud-platformwebsocket
Hannes Hultergård
Hannes Hultergård

Reputation: 1217

Real time communication between clients via websocket server on Google App Engine

This article describes how a websocket server for a chat application can look. We are planning to implement something similar; when a message is sent to the server it is sent to the correct recipient based on an authentication token and the message gets saved in a mysql database.

We will eventually host the server on Google App Engine, and I suspect that that will cause some issues with the above described approach, since that depends on all clients being connected to the same server, and that probably won't be the case since multiple instances will be created as needed. Is there a way to connect all instances so that this won't be a problem (Pub/Sub maybe? (That will cause additional costs though)), or should we find a different solution?

One idea I had was to use mysql-events to monitor the binlog from the websocket server for the creation of new rows in the messages table, but I read somewhere that that wasn't recommend. But I can't find where I read that, and maybe that is the best solution.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 308

Answers (1)

Brian Burton
Brian Burton

Reputation: 3842

Since you asked about other solutions, I would recommend looking at Firebase and specifically the Realtime Database. Out of the box it provides all of the functionality that you need for realtime communication between connected clients and Cloud Messaging for clients who aren't.

Here's a tutorial that uses Firestore to create a realtime chat web app, but it can all be applied to the Realtime Database with minor modification. I say that because Firestore has expensive writes, which in my opinion make it unsuitable for a chat backend.

Upvotes: 1

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