This is a server-side implementation of the WebSockets protocol in Julia. If you want to write a web app in Julia that uses websockets, you'll need this package.

WebSockets.jl is most useful in combination with HttpServer.jl, which takes care of accepting connections and parsing HTTP requests. As you can see in the example code at the bottom of the README, you just define a function that takes a request and a client. The request is an HTTP Request from HttpCommon.jl; the client is a WebSocket, from this package. Your server can write data to the WebSocket, read data from it, send ping or pong messages, or close the connection.

On a historical note, this pacakage started out as part of webstack.jl, and became it's own repo when webstack.jl was fragmented in preparation for making each piece into it's own package.

WebSockets.jl, like the rest of webstack.jl, has only been tested with the development version of Julia. You should install Julia from source if you want to use WebSockets.jl.

##Installation/Setup

# in REQUIRE
WebSockets 0.0.1

# in REPL
julia> Pkg2.add("WebSockets")

This will install WebSockets.jl and it's dependencies (HttpServer.jl, HttpCommon.jl, HttpParser.jl).

At this point, you can test that it all works by cding into the ~/.julia/WebSockets.jl directory and running julia examples/chat.jl. Open localhost:8000 in a browser that supports WebSockets, and you should see a basic IRC-like chat application.

##Echo server example:

using HttpServer
using WebSockets

wsh = WebSocketHandler() do req,client
    while true
        msg = read(client)
        write(client, msg)
    end
  end

server = Server(wsh)
run(server,8080)

To play with a WebSockets echo server, you can:

1. Paste the above code in to the Julia REPL
2. Open localhost:8080 in Chrome
3. Open the Chrome developers tools console
4. Type ws = new WebSocket("ws://localhost:8080"); into the console
5. Type ws.send("hi") into the console.
6. Switch to the 'Network' tab; click on the request; click on the 'frames' tab.
7. You will see the two frames containing "hi": one sent and one received.

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