Not only this, but Moralis’ accessible building platform and unique set of tools also make dApp development quicker and easier than ever. Think of playing Apex Legends, Fortnight, or your favorite multiplayer game. If you do not have real-time data enabled by WebSockets technology, you will probably not fare very well in a head-to-head battle! Multiplayer games let people from all over the world play together.
All collaborators are on the same page with the open communications enabled by WebSocket. Standardized a decade ago through RFC 6455, WebSocket has since matured into one of the main technologies powering the modern web. To close a WebSocket connection, a closing frame is what is websocket used for sent (opcode 0x08). In addition to the opcode, the close frame may contain a body that
indicates the reason for closing. If either side of a connection receives
a close frame, it must send a close frame in response, and no more data
should be sent over the connection.
What are WebSockets used for?
Upgrading to the latest version of WebSocket is a priority, as it gives you access to the best and latest features. First, you want to establish a connection from the client via the WebSocket handshake. Then you will have the client sharing a HTTP request towards the server.
Attempting to do this with MS Word, which does not support Websockets for word processing, will slow the collaboration process. What WebSockets do is essentially extend the conversation between the client and a server. The conversation, instead of ending with that query, can continuously update in real-time and in a seamless, automatic way. But the data will be buffered (stored) in memory and sent out only as fast as network speed allows. And for binary data, we can choose between Blob and ArrayBuffer formats. Afterwards, the data is transferred using the WebSocket protocol, we’ll see its structure (“frames”) soon.
What WebSocket Integration means for Moralis
Before we dive into further details about the WebSocket Handbook, let’s give a brief overview of WebSockets. In a nutshell, WebSocket is a web technology that enables bidirectional, full-duplex communication between client and server over a persistent, single-socket connection. The intent is to provide what is essentially an as-close-to-raw-as-possible TCP communication layer to web application developers.
Extensions are optional and generalized (like compression); subprotocols are mandatory and localized (like ones for chat and for MMORPG games). Either the client or the server can choose to send a message at any time — that’s the magic of WebSockets. However, extracting information from these so-called “frames” of data is a not-so-magical experience. Although all frames follow the same specific format, data going from the client to the server is masked using XOR encryption (with a 32-bit key).
WebSockets vs HTTP: Which to choose for your project
With HTTP, a client requests a resource, and the server
responds with the requested data. HTTP is a strictly unidirectional
protocol — any data sent from the server to the client must be first
requested by the client. Long-polling has traditionally acted as
a workaround for this limitation.
- To mitigate these risks, developers should implement proper security measures, such as encryption, authentication, and input validation.
- The server must return an HTTP 101 Switching Protocols response code for the WebSocket connection to be established.
- A WebSocket is a persistent connection between a client and server.
- We can’t use XMLHttpRequest or fetch to make this kind of HTTP-request, because JavaScript is not allowed to set these headers.
- The Sec-WebSocket-Accept header is important in that the server must derive it from the Sec-WebSocket-Key that the client sent to it.