WebSocket-of-life

Project Url

This is a proof-of-concept game of life implementation using WebSockets.

Overview

Server

The server takes care of generating new boards and emitting compressed version of the boards to the client. Compression happens using lzutf8

Client

The client listens for the emitted events, decompresses the boards, and finally draws them with canvas.

Both client and server are making use of a game of life module I made called jenova. WebPack enables me to use require the same code (commonJS style) in both node and client land. :)

WebSockets

Initializing on the server

// Initialize the websocket by passing in a `http.createServer` instance.
var io = require('socket.io')(server);

Server-Side Web Socket Code

// Emit an io event to the client
io.emit('serverEventName', eventData);

// Or listen on events from the client
io.on('connection', function (socket) {
    socket.on('clientEventName', function(data) {
        // Do something with that event
    });
});

Client-Side Web Socket Code

// Open up a io connection (note, I loaded a script tag from '/socket.io/socket.io.js', exposing the io variable)
var socket = io.connect('');

// Listen to events from the server
socket.on('serverEventName', function (data) {
	// Do something with the server-side event
});

// Emit an event from the client to the server
socket.emit('clientEventName', mydata);

WebPack

I would love to talk all day about what I did to get my project to utilize webpack, but honestly...

Go here instead: https://github.com/petehunt/webpack-howto

By far this is the best webpack how-to.