By Jason Klein

A minimal implementation of client-server WebSocket communication, using expressjs and the nodejs ws library. This repository is intended to demonstrate how it is possible to communicate dashboard data across the client and server in a way that can be tested over localhost (apparently socket.io can do this too but I was having trouble with it earlier when combining it with React).

This repository includes lots of commented code and notes about how to handle things when used as part of a real dashboard project, such as making a consistent client-server communication protocol (maybe with JSON instead of the Strings that I used here...).

I also implemented the same frontend but in react, the source file for which is /react.jsx. While this is the code that would work, the way that it is set up in this respository is not recommended. Use something like vite instead.

Note: Check out this gist, which has some more socket-handling code for when connections are formed and deleted. Someone did exactly this but with socket.io instead of ws.

Note: Also have a look at my Tic-Tac-Toe with websockets project, where I used React context, refs, and useEffect() to manage the game state while communicating with the server.

1. Run npm install
2. Run npm start
3. Navigate to localhost:8000

If you want to make modifications to react.jsx, then make sure to run the following command once you're done making changes. This command will transpile the JSX and place it in the right spot to be loaded. This will also be run with npm run compile.

./node_modules/.bin/babel --presets @babel/preset-react react.jsx -o public/react.js