Question

I am writing a rails app, and I would like to use node.js and socket.io to integrate a chat feature into my app. I plan on having my rails app deployed on one server, and my chat deployed on a much smaller server (to save money). My reasoning for this is, it is OK if a chat message takes 30s to send, but it is not OK for a page to take 30s to load.

Anyway, in order for this to work, I need Rails to server the socket.io client files. If my small node server serves the client files, then the small server will bottleneck the larger one. I have a basic chat prototype up and running, but it only works with node serving the client files. What do I have to do in order to have rails serve the client files?

Thanks in advanced.

Answer 1

So here is the solution I decided upon. Instead of figuring out what client files I need to serve, I decided to let the Node server handle the client javascript. In order to ensure that the Node server does not bottleneck the Rails server, I lazy load the socket.io-client file. The relevant coffee script is:

$ ->
    $.getScript('http://localhost:8080/socket.io/socket.io.js')
    .done (script, textStatus) ->
        socket = io.connect('http://localhost:8080')
        setupSocket(socket)

Where http://localhost:8080 is your Node host/port. setupSocket is a function I wrote that handles setting all the event handlers.