Websockets - why don't we hear about them more?

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1

Searching for node, Mongo, Angular, HTML, CSS, jQuery etc etc yields loads of results.

Searching for Websockets gets you hardly anything.

And I never see people asking questions about it on tech forums. Indeed, searching here gives very little.

So why aren’t they a big deal? I don’t know much about websockets but it seems like it’d be a really useful way of sending data to and from a server or between instances of apps.

Can someone enlighten me? I’d read around but everything on websockets seems to be from around 2010!

2

You might have better luck looking for “TCP”.

I’ve only used it once for a PHP script to detect anonymous proxies.

But you are right, it does seem they could be a very useful thing.
My guess why there isn’t more is because they are “advanced” programming and, like bitwise etc. aren’t used by many.

3

I’m thinking @SubEffect; isn’t talking about regular sockets but rather HTML5 websockets, i.e., http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/start-using-html5-websockets-today--net-13270

I’ve been wondering the exact same thing. I personally think that it’s too much in it’s infancy to be used on a large scale that people are afraid they’ll burn their fingers on it.
The few applications I have seen that use it are very nice though!

4

Could this have anything to do with it?

December 8, 2010

Recent discoveries found that the protocol that Websocket works with is vulnerable to attacks.

I haven’t read much chatter about websockets for years. Is that why?

5

My guess is that a lot of people still use auto-refresh ajax calls. Is it the best way? No but, it’s working well. Unless you are pulling a lot of data at real time then use WebSockets. If it’s refreshing every 5 min then don’t use it. Perhaps, people are googling Socket.IO then Websockets.