Atom-shell and socket.io

[nicola]

I start a socket.io connection with my node script main.js (as in the examples). Now, every time I get a message through socket.io I want a new window to open, but how can I pass the socket variable that contains the connection?

Is there a way to pass variables from the nodejs part to the browser window?

[anaisbetts]

You can't pass the socket itself, only the data that comes through the socket, via the ipc module. I would consider opening the socket in the renderer process instead, it will be much easier to debug

[nicola]

But my issue is that I only open windows when the socket receive a message, so I can't really do them in a window

—
Typed with hands

On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 7:24 PM, Paul Betts notifications@github.com
wrote:

You can't pass the socket itself, only the data that comes through the socket, via the ipc module. I would consider opening the socket in the renderer process instead, it will be much easier to debug

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#1141 (comment)

[bwin]

I would consider opening the socket in the renderer process instead, it will be much easier to debug

&

But my issue is that I only open windows when the socket receive a message, so I can't really do them in a window

You could use a hidden window to open the socket, this way it would already be in the renderer process (and easier to debug).

Typed with hands

👍

[nicola]

What is the advantage of moving the socket logic from the main.js to the renderer process? They still do the same thing (beyond debugging purposes I mean). I don't have really clear how you would solve using the socket connection from the other windows, I guess I will need to use some sort of communication between windows to achieve that

[bwin]

Can you please describe your use case a little bit? Is it a chat app or something? Why do you open a new window per received msg and why do you need to pass your socket to this window?

Edit: Sorry for not answering your questions first.

[bwin]

Also, do you listen on the same socket in the browsercode after passing it to a window, or do you open a new one for in the browsercode after passing the "old" one to a window?
In fewer words: is there just one socket for all windows or would you have a socket for every window + 1 in main.js?

Ok, just ignore this one, I just re-read your first comment.
So you want to do something like:

io.on('connection', function(socket){
  //open new window
  //pass socket to new window
});

[nicola]

//pass socket to new window

This is what I am trying to ask, thanks for your time

[bwin]

Could you tell me something about your use case? What are you trying to accomplish with this?

[nicola]

Overall this is what the app does:

I have an app that when someone is talking to me, it opens a chat window.

I have a socket.io on a server, this allow people to join a room,
when a client join a room and sends a message to the room,
all the people in the room that are connected with their atom-shell app,
the atom-shell app using socket.io-clients that listen to .on('join') will start a new window,
from this window they can keep chatting.

[bwin]

I still can't come up with something better than what Paul Betts already said.
Wrap that shit in ipc. It's an additional layer of indirection, but shouldn't be too much boilerplate. You would basically interact with the socket in the browser-process and re-send the received events to the corresponding windows. And from the windows you could send msgs to the browser-process (also via ipc), which handles the socket stuff.
(You could replace browser-process with your main-window for better debuggability (breakpoints, etc) of the socket-stuff.)

Consider changing the title of this issue to something with "socket.io".
I haven't used socket.io with Atom-Shell, so there might be a much better solution than the proposed. It may be worth asking others for their experience with Atom-Shell & socket.io.

[zcbenz]

You can not explicitly pass an object from browser side to renderer side, but you can make use of remote module to get an object from browser side in renderer, it is a bit puzzling and you can see an example in #1095. Or you can manually do everything with IPC.

But you must notice that remote is implemented with IPC under the hood, so things could be rather slow.