Can I leverage socket.io via the API Builder or Page builder?

[Konrad Hylton]

Hey AppDrag Team,

I'm interested in implementing a simple chat app where users on my webapp can talk to each other. Normally I would be using express.js and then I would just pass app into server and server into io.

However, with appdrag it's not like I'm using express to handle my serve configurations so I don't really know how routes, paths and other server configurations are being handled behind the scenes.

Is there any way to make a use socket.io to facilitate an online chat feature in my appdrag app? If not any advice on how I could implement some other solution for my online chat use case?

[Joseph Benguira]

Hey Konrad,

Short answer:
Not currently, but we are working on it

Long answer:
Currently we are using AWS Lambda serverless technology to execute at any scale ... but they don't directly support websockets, they do have an integration with API Gateway ... we have tested it and this solution do not meet our requirements in terms of latency. We are working on another approach for long lived process and websocket servers, we expect to have something available this summer.

You can check our early publication of the open source core of this here:
https://github.com/elestio/cloudgate

You might be interested by this sample basic chat app:
App definition: https://github.com/elestio/cloudgate/blob/master/apps/Websocket/appconfig.json
Frontend: https://github.com/elestio/cloudgate/blob/master/apps/Websocket/public/wsChat.html
Backend: https://github.com/elestio/cloudgate/blob/master/apps/Websocket/API/websocket/Chat.js

You can run this right now on your computer or a VM, but this summer you will be able to create it & publish it to our serverless platform

[Konrad Hylton]

@Joseph-Benguira Thanks, Joseph! I'll look into those links and play around with them in the meanwhile.

[Daniel Mulroy]

Bumping this up, @Joseph-Benguira any progress on this? I'm starting to have use cases for socket.io piling up

If not sockets.io, is something like this
https://www.serverless.com/blog/realtime-updates-using-lambda-websockets-iot
compatible with PageBuilder/CloudBackend?

[Linda MacDonald]

@Joseph-Benguira your plans around cloudgate sound phenomenal ️ +1