🗿 Added a real-time Dashboard with Socket.io

[dstroot]

Thought this project would be more fun/interesting with a real-time dashboard driven by socket.io.

I created a new dashboard page that shows real-time connections and browsing activity. Typically this would be in an admin-type area of the app.

I know this clutters the example a bit so you may not want to accept this but it's pretty cool. No worries if you don't want to merge it.

[sahat]

Hi dstroot, thank you for your pull request. I have written a detailed explanation in the guide section on how to use socket.io with hackathon starter as to why this cannot be part of the project. That section explains everything one needs to get started with socket.io. I used your committed code as a reference, with slight modifications to make things simple, so not to overwhelm beginners with all that production optimization stuff.

I have taken a few things from your code and merged it with master:

• development or production mode message when you start the server.
• use friendlier time, e.g. day, hour, week, month for caching maxAge.
• var socket = io.connect(window.location.href);. This is really nice, since most examples on the web use hard-coded URLs which becomes a problem when you are developing on localhost and then deploy your app.

[sixFingers]

I would also suggest to present Sockjs as a valid (i would say, preferable) alternative to Socket.io.

[dstroot]

Sahat - I like how you documented this in the readme - very cool!

[sahat]

@sixFingers I have not heard of Sockjs until you mentioned it. It's just socket.io seems to be the de facto library for doing websockets in Node. Can it do something that socket.io cannot do? From learning perspective I would imagine socket.io would be easier to learn for beginners due to large number of available tutorials, screencasts, guides on the topic.

@dstroot Thanks!

[sixFingers]

@sahat this is a good explanation of the differences: http://xsnippet.org/359042/
From my personal experience, Socket.io is more feature-packed, but less reliable than Sockjs.
Sockjs also can count on a good number of extensions (ex: for events, there's https://github.com/epixa/chuckt). Just my two cents :)

[bcldvd]

First of all, thanks to both sahat and dstroot for your wonderfull work :)

Just some correction in the readme, you forgot to add this change :

app.listen(app.get('port'), function() {

to

server.listen(app.get('port'), function() {

Without this, socket.io.js is not found :/

[sahat]

@bcldvd Thanks! I have it as server.listen() at http://hackathonstarter.herokuapp.com demo code but forgot to add it in the README. The socket.io guide should be updated now.