Question

I’ve understood that Heroku does not offer support for websockets, and still one can run a Faye server, and have realtime notifications on the client side.

How is this working, more specifically from a client’s browser point of view? Is it supported across all major browsers? Is it falling back to another “protocol” different than the websocket one?

Answer 1

You can disable Faye’s websocket support client-side with:

client.disable('websocket');

As discussed in their docs: http://faye.jcoglan.com/browser.html In that case it falls back to long-polling as the protocol.

This is a common fallback approach and is used by other real-time messaging libraries such as Socket.io.

Hope that helps!