Hi all
I gave a presentation at KrtConf on Tuesday detailing the new features and ideas going into SocketStream 0.3. In summary these are:
* A complete rewrite of 0.2 to make the core more modular to encourage contributions and 3rd party addons. This is the top priority!
* New custom websocket responders. We will ship with Events and RPC as per 0.2, but you will easily be able to make your own responders for high speed gaming and models. Rather than trying to 'solve' models for you, this approach allows multiple ideas to bloom - allowing us all to figure out what works and support it in the future.
* New Client Asset Manager. Allows you to serve different single page clients to different devices, depending upon URLs and User Agent. We will also support a greater variety of templating libs.
* Websocket Middleware, works like Connect middleware allowing you to handle logging and authentication before any of the RPC functions are called
* Transport Agnostic. I demoed on stage a simple app working in SocketIO then instantly switching to Pusher Pipe by changing one line of config in your app, instantly enabling front-end scaling and the ability to deploy to Heroku. As the transport layer is also modular it will be easy to use Sock JS and other libraries in the future without changing any of your application code. This is a killer feature and unique to SocketStream
I will continue working on the 0.3 code this month and hope to get something on github within 3-4 weeks for people to comment on and play with. Expect the first proper 0.3 release by the end of the year. In the mean time we will continue to refine 0.2, including support for Node 0.6 when Connect 2.0 is stable.
I will also post a link to the video of the presentation in this thread once it's available.
If anyone would like to help in anyway with SocketStream 0.3 please get in touch. We've already had a great contribution from Tadek who has written an independent module which loads a directory into an 'API Tree' and is now included within the 0.3 core. We've also got a great new logo for SocketStream 0.3 which has been kindly contributed by Craig Jordan Muir, the creator of the excellent NodeUp podcast.
Thanks to everyone for the support and the kind comments after the presentation. Really looking forward to getting 0.3 to you soon.
Owen