Question

I’m messing around with Node JS and socket.io and I’m a bit lost. In the following code I’m saving references to the socket upon creation then transmiting messages captured from the console. all works well, but I feel like this is not the right approach.

Your thoughts?

var app = require('http').createServer(handler)
    , io = require('socket.io').listen(app)
    , fs = require('fs');

app.listen(80);

function handler(req, res) {
    fs.readFile('C:/node/index.html',
        function (err, data) {
            if (err) {
                res.writeHead(500);
                return res.end('Error loading index.html');
            }

            res.writeHead(200);
            res.end(data);
        });
}

var Sender = {
    sockets:[],
    sendMsg:function (msg) {
        for (var i = 0; i < Sender.sockets.length; i++) {
            Sender.sockets[i].emit('news', msg);
        }
    }
};


process.openStdin().addListener("data", function (text) {
    Sender.sendMsg(text.toString());
});

io.sockets.on('connection', function (socket) {
    //Saving reference
    Sender.sockets.push(socket);
});

Answer 1

Indeed, you can remove your Sender and all references to it.

process.openStdin().addListener("data", function (text) {
    io.sockets.emit('news', text.toString())
});

This will emit the message to all connected clients.

There are a few examples on http://socket.io/, I suggest you check them out.