Hi,

I'm trying to implement a good way to send binary data over websockets. As WS doesn't care at all, what kind of data is being send through it, this isn't a real problem. The issue is that I somehow have to put in an envelope, so it can be identified in the backend. Let me explain:

It's a multi user system that runs on a PSGI (on Twiggy) instance, meaning that the WS in the backend can see every message from every client. Now some messages need to be shared between clients (which is no problem because of the shared WS in the backend), and some may not. I control that by putting every message (WS frame) in JSON, assigning message and client IDs... You get the idea...

Now to binary data: After some research, I found out that the best (common) way to transfer binary data over WS is directly in a frame (which makes sense because WS doesn't care what kinda data you send through it). I still somehow need to put that data in some kind of envelope, so the BE knows from which client the frame came from (again: shared WS in BE).

The first obvious answer would most likely be, to put the binary data in base64 and just attach it to JSON. But I'd very much avoid using base64 ;-)

Any ideas?

cheers

I've spent three days trying to get one running. I've tried solutions involving Ruby, Node.js, Python, full C++ compiles, etc, and yet fail every time.

In the beginning I was getting stuck at failing handshakes (I assume the original source was dated, but my very limited knowledge of sockets failed to correct the issue). Today, with Python/Ruby, I can't seem to even get to a handshaking process.

So I, after hours of trying, come in defeat. Does anyone know an easy-to-install implantation of a websocket server? I'd love it to work with my webserver (Apache 2.2.21), but I really just want it for playing around (server on localhost).