websocketd

Dev tools

websocket server

SHOW HN2015

421points
140comments
#26of 2,565 in 2015
Top 2%of 2015 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

12 positive, 37 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 13 critical, out of 64 comments about the project. Thread score +0.03.

Idea: 6 for, 5 againstPerformance: 1 for, 5 againstExecution: 0 for, 2 againstDocs: 0 for, 1 againstDesign: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Elegant, useful for prototyping and admin tools.

    From 3 comments
    • Elegant approach. Reminds me of inetd.
      jkarneges on HN
    • This is cool. I can see this being used for prototyping and validating an idea before going full steam ahead with a more scalable framework.
      dkarapetyan on HN
    • This is perfect for admin tools. I'd rather parse stdout strings than code a custom API.
      runewell on HN

Objections

  • One process per connection has high overhead at scale.

    From 3 comments
    • Unless you need to handle a very small number of concurrent connections, using 1 process per connection seems to be a huge overhead, although I can think of some use cases.…
      elierotenberg on HN
    • > Each inbound WebSocket connection runs your program in a dedicated process. Connections are isolated by process. That sounds bad; it is like “CGI, twenty years later”, as they…
      kragen on HN
    • Looks very nice for quick prototype kind of things in any language or to make existing tools quickly available to a small circle of users! for larger-scale usage the overhead…
      detaro on HN

Requests

  • Support for pub/sub and server-initiated messages.

    From 1 comment
    • I don't understand how I'd use this. WebSockets are generally for server-initiated events, but this doesn't make it very easy to initiate events on the server. Usually it will be…
      ianbicking on HN

Questions

  • How are message boundaries handled?

    From 2 comments
    • How are message boundaries handled? WebSockets are message-based. UNIX streams are not.
      kalmi10 on HN
    • websocketd treats each line as a message. i.e. boundaries are marked with \n
      joewalnes on HN

Alternatives named

  • websockify

    From 1 comment
    • A project in a similar vein is websockify ( https://github.com/kanaka/websockify ) , which makes an existing app with a TCP endpoint available over websockets.
      NathanOsullivan on HN
  • netcat

    From 1 comment
    • Why is this better than netcat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netcat
      romanpoet on HN
  • EventSource

    From 1 comment
    • For simple one-directional communication (Server to client(s)) as shown in the example, it may for many people be simpler to use EventSource [1] I've used this for UI's where the…
      lordlarm on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

Add a badge to your READMEShown on HackerShow
[![Shown on HackerShow](https://hackershow.org/badge.svg)](https://hackershow.org/show/9050970)