When to use socket.io?

Question

I am learning NodeJS and was able to make a server and an iPhone app that issues an HTTP GET request to the server and retrieve a JSON string from it. I didn't need to use socket.io for this. So why would I need to use it?

Answer 1

If you are just pulling JSON from the server your solution works fine. However suppose you want to push data from the server back to the client. Socket.io is a very elegant solution for doing this. Firstly because it handles the push side and secondly because it handles browser degradation gracefully as the 'jQuery of sockets'