Socket.io可以连接到什么？

Question

I'm playing around with an open source project that uses Socket.IO to connect to the website chat.meatspac.es which is hosted on a different server. It connects like this

var socket = socketClient.connect('https://chat.meatspac.es');

And then it listens for the data that is also published on chat.meatspac.es . Does this only work because the chat.meatspac.es is also a Socket.IO application and it's emitting signals that can be picked up by this other open sourced project?

For example, I naively tried to connect to my Twitter stream

 var socket = socketClient.connect('https://twitter.com/username');

but it wouldn't listen for messages published in my Twitter feed.

So, my question is, can Socket.IO only connect to servers that are emitting Socket.IO messages?

Answer 1

socket.io allows simulation of socket API (used in traditional desktop apps) for access with javascript (web).

But this is will not behave exactly as traditional sockets behave. It uses HTML5 websockets for sockets simulation

Sockets.io needs to have a compatible server app, that is shown here by deploying a server app using nodejs

Take a look at server side implementations of websockets today, socket.io with nodejs being one of them. http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/websockets/basics/

So for your question using socket.io to create a socket connection to twitter:

var socket = socketClient.connect('https://twitter.com/username');

This is not possible because socket.io is not a real socket API, its just a simulation of sockets api using HTML5 websocket api and maybe other fallbacks (long polling, comet, etc). So the server should be compatible to handle the ws(websocket protocol) request and in case of twitter here to get feed stream, this is not the case so this can not be done like that.

See the twitter api to programmatically get access to twitter resources

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1