BRPC

A binary-only RPC protocol for websockets (think socket.io, only faster).

Usage

var http = require('http');
var brpc = require('brpc');
var rpc = brpc.createServer();
var server = http.createServer();
var socket;
 
rpc.attach(server);
 
rpc.on('socket', function(socket) {
  socket.hook('foo', function(items) {
    var result = new Buffer('bar');
    return Promise.resolve([result]);
  });
  socket.listen('bar', function(items) {
    console.log('Received bar: ', items);
  });
});
 
server.listen(8000);
 
socket = brpc.connect(8000);
 
socket.on('open', function() {
  console.log('Calling foo...');
  socket.call('foo', []).then(function(items) {
    console.log('Response for foo: ', items);
  });
  console.log('Sending bar...');
  socket.dispatch('bar', [new Buffer('baz')]);
});

Why?

Most websocket-based protocols use JSON. JSON is big and slow. In many cases when needing to send binary data over a convential websocket protocol, the programmer is forced to use hex strings inside of the JSON serialization. This is inefficient.

BRPC works only with binary data. Furthermore, most event-based abstractions on top of websockets introduce an enormous amount of bloat due to the inclusion of fallback transports (xhr, longpolling, etc) as well as even higher level abstractions (channels).

BRPC gives you a simple event based interface and nothing else. No channels, no fallback, no complicated handshakes or feature testing over HTTP.

Specification

See spec.md.

Contribution and License Agreement

If you contribute code to this project, you are implicitly allowing your code to be distributed under the MIT license. You are also implicitly verifying that all code is your original work. </legalese>

License

• Copyright (c) 2017, Christopher Jeffrey (MIT License).

See LICENSE for more info.