Websockets, Node.js, Socket.io and sockjs
The past few days, I've been working on getting a server set up for CardFarm. This was pretty irritating - had to go through the modem, forward ports, install IIS, run a node.js server (made sense since I'm using all Javascript for this), and then I spent a few days getting socket.io set up.
Socket.io is great - the syntax is easy to understand and it's quick to get implemented in your node.js with a quick "npm install socket" (I think that was it). Unfortunately, not a single thing I could do would allow CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing). CORS basically makes it so that Javascript can access pages on other domains. Because of my weird setup, I'm hosting the game itself on GoDaddy and the server on my local machine. I'm planning on moving to Azure, but that's for another day.
So basically, if you are hosting your server separately from your files, then socket.io is not your best bet. Instead, I've been forced to go with sockjs (which has less documentation than Gilgamesh). The syntax is a bit more awkward for sockjs, in my opinion. It mimicks websockets exactly, so if you're used to that, it's probably pretty neat, but for some reason it's been really stubborn with the transferrance of objects and whatnot.
Sorry this post hasn't been very informative, just kinda wanted to record my discoveries here. My mind's a little too fried to get into too much detail with all this. Servers are hardly my forte.