Wesley

Version: 0.3.5
Master build:

Wesley? What the frig?

Wesley is a protocol compliant web socket server with some awesome extras.

$ npm install wesley

Usage

var server = require('wesley').listen(3000);
 
server.on('connection', function(client) {
 
    // Relay data to all clients on the server
    client.on('data', function(data) {
        server.write(data);
    });
 
});

Pooling

Sometimes it's necessary to maintain logical pools of clients (AKA namespaces, rooms, topics, etc).

var server = require('wesley').listen(3000);
 
server.on('connection', function(client, pool) {
 
    // Relay data to the current pool of clients
    client.on('data', function(data) {
        pool.write(data);
    });
 
});

The default pooling strategy separates clients based on the path they connect to.

ws://localhost:3000/            # Server and / events 
ws://localhost:3000/pool        # Server and /pool events 
ws://localhost:3000/pool/child  # Server and /pool/child events 

This behavoiur can be overridden by passing in your own handler. The callback expects to be called with the name of the pool to join.

var pooling = function(client, callback) {
    callback('pool-name');
};
var server = require('wesley').listen(3000).pool(pooling);
 
server.on('connection', function(client, pool) {
 
    // Handle the client
    client.write('You\'ve just joined the ' + pool.name + ' pool.');
 
});

Inbound messages

By default, a Wesley client will emit data for every message sent from the client. You can entirely replace this behaviour at your leisure.

var inbound = function(data, emit) {
    emit('message', data);
};
var server = require('wesley').listen(3000).in(inbound);
 
server.on('connection', function(client) {
 
    client.on('message', function(message) {
        // Handle the message
    });
 
});

This also means you could handle more complicated messages than simple strings.

var inbound = function(json, emit) {
    var data = JSON.parse(json);
    emit('data', data);
};
var server = require('wesley').listen(3000).in(inbound);
 
server.on('connection', function(client) {
 
    client.on('data', function(data) {
        // Handle the data
    });
 
});

Wesley clients inherit from EventEmitter2, so even more complex events can be listened to.

var inbound = function(json, emit) {
    var data = JSON.parse(json);
    emit(['client', data.type], data);
};
var server = require('wesley').listen(3000).in(inbound);
 
server.on('connection', function(client) {
 
    client.on(['client', 'message'], function(data) {
        // Handle data with `data.type === message`
    });
 
    client.on(['client', '*'], function(data) {
        // Handle all client data
    });
 
});

Outbound messages

In much the same way as handling inbound messages, you can also handle outbound messages.

var outbound = function(type, message, emit) {
    var packed = JSON.stringify{type:type, body:message};
    emit(packed);
};
var server = require('wesley').listen(3000).out(outbound);
 
server.on('connection', function(client) {
 
    // Send data to the client
    client.write('message', 'Derp.');
 
});

Transports

As Wesley is a web socket server, it uses a socket transport by default. You can create custom transports by extending wesley.Transport. It is the job of the transport to proxy events listened to by the client or server. Please see the documentation for more detail (Coming soon).

Once you have a client, using it is simple.

var wesley = require('wesley');
var server = new wesley.Server([
    // An array of transports
    new CustomTransport()
]);
 
server.on('connection', function(client, pool) {
 
    // Client wraps the the transport the connection came through
    client.write('Derp.');
 
});

Command line client

I can tell you're super excited to start working on your web socket server. One thing you may find useful is a client to start interacting with. This command line client will hopefully give you what you need to get started.

$ wesley --help
 
  Usage: wesley [options]
 
  Options:
 
    -h, --help                output usage information
    -V, --version             output the version number
    -u, --uri <string>        host address
    -p, --protocol <integer>  web socket protocol
 
  Default:
 
    wesley --uri ws://localhost:3000 --protocol 13

Contributing

I accept contributions to the source via Pull Request, but passing unit tests must be included before it will be considered for merge.

$ make install
$ make tests

If you have Vagrant installed, you can build our dev environment to assist development. The repository will be mounted in /srv.

$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh
$ cd /srv

License

The content of this library is released under the MIT License by Andrew Lawson.
You can find a copy of this license at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit