Giacomo Vacca

On a previous post I shared my experiments with node.js as a WebSocket server. This is quite useful for people working on WebRTC prototypes and familiar with node.js. Some of the readers may have noticed that I was using plain WebSockets ('ws://' URLs). It's recommended to use Secure WebSockets instead ('wss://' URLs), so I thought of playing with the 'ws' node.js module and "add TLS". On github there's an example in this direction (see below), but I must admit I didn't understand some implications at first. I thought the instantiation of an HTTPS server was just coincidental and meant to provide the web pages and scripts in the example, and that the configuration of 'ws' with 'ssl: true' and certificates was independent. It turns out it's not. The best description of my understanding is that you need an HTTPS server to "decorate" the WebSocket module. The HTTPS server will take care of connectio...

Docker is an incredibly useful tool to build prototypes of Linux hosts and applications. You can easily build a network of servers inside a single virtual machine, with each server represented by a docker container. Clients can access the services on the same IP address, but different ports. In this post I'd like to talk about a common prototype case in WebRTC  platforms: a WebSocket server. This will be a node.js server and will run inside a Docker container (hosted by an Ubuntu Trusty VM). The server logic can be as complex as you can imagine, but since it's not the point of this post I'll keep it as simple as the server example in the node.js websocket module : The WebSocket server will listen on port 8080, accept incoming connections, send back "something" upon client connection, and log the content of the messages from the clients. We can assume all the files in this article are in the same folder, and we're cd into it. The server logic is...