Websocket application that is not a game, chat, twitter client or market index

Question

I've searched for websocket applications and the only things that I've found is games, twitter clients, chats and market indices. I want to know if anyone knows any applications that use websockets that are not mentioned in the above applications.

Answer 1

Any web application that uses real time collaboration, like collaborative coding or editing documents. (E.g. MS Office uses SocketIO)

You can also use it to have push notifications to a user interface at any time. Can be useful for news pages.

Answer 2

Anything that you're currently doing with polling. Chat is the obvious one. Comment threads are similar. Ever write and answer on SO and have it tell you another answer was just posted? Can be done with a socket. Anything with realtime monitoring like stock prices, web site traffic, location of your Uber cab. I think there's a ton of opportunities available.

Answer 3

A year after the question was asked, it seems begging for a more general response. It's still early days for WebSockets without a lot of applications yet. At this point, major browsers support websockets but there is still little backend support. Besides kaazing, mentioned above, I disclose that I've written one of the existing standard conformant "servers." (Websocket Server Demonstration)

You can replace what you now do with http with websockets, but everyone is being careful not to say that it's something that needs to be done. WebSockets are a mechanism for bidirectional communication; which means, you can, if you want to, use it for everything, including http type request-response. But you don't need to replace http. If what you want is request-response, then there's nothing wrong with http. That's what it was built for. WebSockets are initiated by "upgrading" an http connection request. If you're still thinking about web-browser applications the way they've mostly been done to this point, then you're probably ok with http ... the protocol that's defined the character of most current web apps (because it was there).

You could previously get bidirectional communication in application components, but it was tough in the browser ... that's where the sticky bit was. Believe me, I've written enough work-arounds to know .. Applets upon Applets, etc. It's also good to have a standard in place, even for what was previously possible. This means that even app components will have a new standardized support for open bidirectional communication (outside the scope of a single server, etc. ...). Now that WebSockets are here, developers need to start thinking of the browser differently ... as more of a universal interface ... a real application interface, not just an interface for cat pictures and web shops. The big revolution this should bring is in no longer needing to download and install program components to make bidirectional communication possible.

One of the applications I worked on back in my Applet days, was a control station for autonomous or semi-autonomous robotics. Using the browser (everyone's got one on all those different devices), it was begging for websockets. Your robot is out doing something and needs to contact or report to the human operator. The operator doesn't have to click to refresh to get the message and the app developer doesn't need any fancy work-arounds or build their own interface to get the message to the browser immediately. The robot's owner / operator doesn't need to install a software app on the cell phone or whatever. Just use websockets.

Another example from the olden days, when people wrote complicated work-arounds to get it done, is stock trading. A stock trading application can now more easily be written to use everybody's browser on all types of devices as the interface, without the need to download and install a stock trading application. As prices and other information changes, the browser gets an update. At the same time, the trader can click a buy or sell button at any time, etc.

Answer 4

Kaazing has a handful of demos online (disclosure: I work for Kaazing):

• http://kaazing.me: On this page you see a data center monitoring component (bottom right corner), as well as live content feed coming from the New York Times.
• Messaging on top of WebSockets: The WebSocket protocol was designed to be the transport layer for higher level protocols. The screen cast in the referred blog post starts showing the JMS demos around 3:00.

Answer 5

trello.com is a website that uses websockets. Here is a fantastic post on the tecnologies that are used

Answer 6

Here are some demos involving WebSockets and Arduino:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va7j86thW5M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVJV2z-lQJE

http://yopero-tech.blogspot.com/2012/02/arduino-websocket.html

And here is a beatbox HTML5 audio player controlled from Android controller pad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZvH8BH_3H4

Disclaimer: I am author of Autobahn.

Answer 7

You might be interested in noVNC which is a full VNC client (using Canvas and WebSocket).

I created noVNC (VNC client) two years years ago (hosted version at http://noVNC.com) and it has been adopted by several other notable projects and companies.

noVNC uses WebSockets to connect to the VNC server. If the VNC server supports WebSocket connections directly (currently only libvncserver/x11vnc) then you can connect directly. Otherwise, you need to use websockify to bridge from WebSockets to TCP. Websockify is not specific to the RFB/VNC protocol and can be used to create web applications that can communicate with any existing network service (I have a minimal but working start of an IRC client and telnet client in the websockify project).