Suggestion for implementation of clients API

[cha0s]

No description provided.

[cha0s]

I bumped socket.io and socket.io-client in the dev dependencies, obviously they will have to be bumped again if this goes in to reflect the other PRs I've made on this topic.

[cha0s]

socketio/socket.io-adapter#24
socketio/socket.io#1966

Just to link them together

[rauchg]

So, this is a great foundation for this patch. Thanks a lot for submitting this PR.

I think it's going to require some minor refactoring to adapt to our goal of getting rid of pattern subscriptions. Otherwise, with minor potential API changes, this is the solution we'll deploy.

The API changes I'm still debating in my mind are:

• do we care about an API to only receive local clients (to the specific node), or do we make it transparent and always expose all nodes?
• do we care about filtering by room?

[rauchg]

So far I think I'm No - Yes on those questions.

[rauchg]

If the answers were Yes - Yes, I think we should consider exposing two methods clients and allClients

[cha0s]

Interesting, first I saw #46. It's a really good idea to do things that way.

I think it makes sense to filter based on namespace/room. Especially once #46 goes in it'll be even less overhead since we won't have to hit every namespace in every node

[cha0s]

Oh, also I'm not sure about the local/remote clients thing. I'm leaning towards No - Yes myself, because I don't think the overhead will be too high, and once you get those IDs you could check them against the local state (though, peeking into internals, which isn't polite...)

Honestly when I started this out I was envisioning being able to use a socket ID from a remote node to be able to emit a message from another node, but that seems like a convulted process as well. I almost wonder if this API should be introduced only if there is some kind of '(emit|broadcast)To' function that instead of operating on a socket, takes a socket ID. I have been struggling with the idea that perhaps the use case for clients as it stands isn't as useful as I thought. However, if enough people want it I don't mind anyway.

[rauchg]

@cha0s the API you mention already exists. Every socket joins a room identified by their session id.
http://socket.io/docs/rooms-and-namespaces/#default-room

[cha0s]

I totally forgot about that. Obviously that makes this a lot more useful than I thought when I wrote that post!

[darrachequesne]

Closed by #109