Question

Is is must to have the client to be browser for a web server? Is this a good architecture for mobile clients to have some non browser client and get data from webservers?

I am thinking of implementing a basic browser at mobile client. Login using web methos and rest of the communication (monitoring info at every 10sec) be done using web sockets. Will this work?

Can I implement web sockets without JS?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can implement WebSockets outside the browser, and without any JavaScript involved. You could have i.e. a Android native Java application that talks to a server over WebSockets.

WebSockets is a protocol. The WebSockets API defined for JavaScript running in the browser is something different.

You can authenticate a WebSockets connection during the WebSockets handshake using any method available with HTTP (i.e. basic auth, digest, cram-md5, client cert.-based (TLS), and so on), since the WebSockets handshake is still like any other HTTP conversation. It is only after the handshake is completed that WS is different from HTTP.

Note, that what you likely want on the server side is not a plain old Web server, but a WebSockets server/framework.

Whether using WS to connect mobile clients is “a good architecture” is a bit vague. I would say: if you decide to have your mobile client talk to a server, and that server is under your control, and you want to leverage WS advantages like near real-time/bidirectional, then it might be good. Better than cooking your own low-level protocol.