Playing with sending framed data over tcp sockets. Because udp in node is slow.

UPDATE: the benchmarks say that udp is faster than framed tcp. Feel free to run them (see bench/) to see for yourself.

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jotan — s‍trings o‍ver t‍cp a‍nd n‍etstrings

This is a thin wrapper around the netstrings module which makes it easy to send strings & buffers over tcp.

If you feel like sending json you can do that, all you need to do is add a line to stringify and a line to parse, as you can see in tests/json.js.

install

$ npm install jotan --save

client

how to connect to a server

  var j = jotan(PORT, HOST)
  j.send(new Buffer('café'))
  j.send('c')

  setTimeout(function() {
    j.send('life rocks!')

    // fails due to default 1000ms timeout on the server
    setTimeout(function() {
      j.send('life rocks!')
      j.end()
    }, 1100)

  }, 500)

server

One .send from the client results in one data event on the server's messageStream.

Where possible the API mimics that of the net module.

See tests/strings-and-buffers.js for a working example.

  jotan.createServer(onConnection, { port: PORT })

  function onConnection(rawSocket, messageStream) {
    messageStream.on('data', function(buf) {
      as.equal('object', typeof buf)
      var str = buf.toString('utf8')
      console.log('server>', str, '?', MSGS[msgsReceived])
    })
  }

todos

• client
  • reconnect
  • emit errors
  • chainable
  • pipeable
  • socket.setKeepAlive
• server
  • what to do when client sends bad data
  • if payload is too big, as dictated by the prepended length, drop it to prevent ddos
  • emit errors
  • chainable
  • drop data instead of backpressure
• tests!
  • performance / stress
  • good values for server timeout

MIT License