As both the WebSocket Protocol and the WebSocket API gain full-fledged support in the Windows 8 Consumer preview, ASP.NET developers can start taking advantage of the bidirectional capabilities by using System.Web.WebSockets library.

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In the Windows 8 consumer preview and Server beta, IE10 and all other Microsoft WebSocket client and server features now support the final version of the IETF WebSocket Protocol. In addition, IE10 implements the W3C WebSocket API Candidate Recommendation. An article on the IE team blog explains this in much more detail.

Meanwhile, ASP.NET Developers can start using the System.Web.WebSockets library introduced in .NET Framework 4.5 to leverage this technology. Note that this is different from the System.Net.WebSockets namespace which contains the actual implementation of the WebSocket standard in .NET – System.Web.WebSockets provides the integration of this implementation with ASP.NET.

WebSocket is a technology for providing bi-directional communication channels over a single TCP socket. This is a much simpler alternative to using Comet Channels to allow the web server to push data to a web client, without the client explicitly requesting it. Although the technology itself has been available since much earlier (Google Chrome first announced support for it in late 2009), it finally became a Proposed Standard last December essentially receiving a nod from the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Node.js is a server side software system designed for writing scalable Internet applications, notably web servers. Programs are written on the server side in JavaScript, using event-driven, asynchronous I/O to minimize overhead and maximize scalability.

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Node.js Background and Details

Node.js consists of Google's V8 JavaScript engine, libUV, and several built-in libraries.

Node.js was created by Ryan Dahl starting in 2009, and its growth is sponsored by Joyent, his employer.

Dahl's original goal was to create the ability to make web sites with push capabilities as seen in web applications like Gmail. After trying solutions in several other programming languages he chose JavaScript because of the lack of an existing I/O API. This allowed him to define a convention of non-blocking, event-driven I/O.

Similar environments written in other programming languages include Twisted for Python, Perl Object Environment for Perl, libevent for C, Vert.x for Java and EventMachine for Ruby. Unlike most JavaScript programs, it is not executed in a web browser, but is instead a server-side JavaScript application. Node.js implements some CommonJS specifications. It provides a REPL environment for interactive testing.

References:

If you need further references about Node.js, please refer to:

- http://nodejs.org/
- http://www.nodebeginner.org/
- http://nodemanual.org