I have a c# tcp server, I want to connect to the server via a html client page.
The problem: There is no simple way to create TCP sockets in Javascript on a browser side. Although solutions like Websockets allow to create something that resemble sockets, you can use them to connect only to servers that support Websockets. Not to any random servers that know nothing about HTTP.
so is there a solution to connect to my srver.
No. There just isn't. The browser is a tightly locked down environment. The only socket connection that you can open from JavaScript is WebSocket. Since it's your server, adding WebSocket support shouldn't be too complicated, and there are WebSocket libraries available for C#.
Maybe someone else will have an idea for you, but...
The best solution I can think of is for your server to support websockets.
The situation you described - along with connectivity issues for traffic passing through proxies and routers - is one of the reasons Websockets were introduced in the first place.
Bare in mind that Websockets can send and receive binary data. It's just that javascript make it more comfortable to write text based messages.
Also, many NAT routers, Proxies and firewalls will block raw TCP/IP communication while allowing Http communication to pass through. This is why you have a better chance at connection establishment and retention when implementing the Websocket protocol.
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I have a c# tcp server, I want to connect to the server via a html client page.
The problem: There is no simple way to create TCP sockets in Javascript on a browser side. Although solutions like Websockets allow to create something that resemble sockets, you can use them to connect only to servers that support Websockets. Not to any random servers that know nothing about HTTP.
so is there a solution to connect to my srver.
No. There just isn't. The browser is a tightly locked down environment. The only socket connection that you can open from JavaScript is WebSocket. Since it's your server, adding WebSocket support shouldn't be too complicated, and there are WebSocket libraries available for C#.
Maybe someone else will have an idea for you, but...
The best solution I can think of is for your server to support websockets.
The situation you described - along with connectivity issues for traffic passing through proxies and routers - is one of the reasons Websockets were introduced in the first place.
Bare in mind that Websockets can send and receive binary data. It's just that javascript make it more comfortable to write text based messages.
Also, many NAT routers, Proxies and firewalls will block raw TCP/IP communication while allowing Http communication to pass through. This is why you have a better chance at connection establishment and retention when implementing the Websocket protocol.
I am interested to know if anyone has built a javascript websocket listener for a browser. Basically the server side of a websocket that runs in a client. This would allow messages to be sent to the client directly. Why? Because instead of having a Node.js, python, java, etc, server process sitting on or near the client/browser, I can just use a thread in the browser as a listening server thread. I don't think that any browsers support this currently.
I've run across answers like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2316132
Just curious if anyone has done this. I believe that the current Websockets spec does not support listeners on the browser. It would make the deployment of various peer-to-peer applications a bit easier to deploy.
WebRTC allows for peer-to-peer connections to be made between browsers.
You would still need a server in order for individual users to discover each other but then they could connect directly to each other rather than having to pass all their traffic via a central server.
The idea.
You can use a simple echo server written in any language. Your script can send the data to the server then get it back, handle it on the same page with different functions/classes emulating the real server.
An example: http://www.websocket.org/echo.html
Then, you can think about different formats of packets to/from server to diffirentiate them inside one script.
I've read about WebSockets but they don't seem to be pure "sockets", because there is an application layer protocol over them. "ws:"
Is there any way of doing a pure socket connection from a web browser, to enliven webpages?
Here are my random stabs in the dark
Applets sockets provided by Java (need java installed)
Flash sockets provided by Flash (need flash installed)
But about HTML5, Why are they called WebSockets if they aren't Sockets?
Is the websocket protocol so simple to implement that it is "almost"-sockets?
I've read about WebSockets but they don't seem to be pure "sockets", because there is an application layer protocol over them.
[Is the] websocket protocol so simple to implement that [it is] "almost"-sockets?
Allowing regular socket connections directly from the browser is never going to happen because it opens up a huge risk. WebSockets is about as close to raw sockets from the browser as you are going to get. The initial WebSockets handshake is similar to an HTTP handshake (allowing web servers to proxy/bridge it) and adds CORS type security. In addition, WebSockets is a message based transport (rather than streaming as raw TCP) and this is done using a two byte header on each message frame.
Even flash is not able to quite make raw TCP connections. Flash sockets also add CORS security, but instead of an in-band handshake, flash socket connections make a connection to port 843 on the target server to request a security policy file.
Is there any way of doing a pure socket connection from a web browser, to enliven webpages?
Yes, you can use my websockify bridge/proxy which allows a WebSockets enabled browser to connect directly to a TCP socket via websockify.
But about HTML5, Why are they called WebSockets if they aren't Sockets?
WebSockets are a transport built on TCP sockets. After the handshake there is very minimal overhead (typically just a two byte header).
I can't improve on Kanaka's answers to your secondary questions, and I know this question is a year old. But for the main question, Is there any way of doing a pure socket connection from a web browser, to enliven webpages? There is a project called the Java / JavaScript Socket Bridge that might be what you (or anyone coming across this page from a Google search) are looking for. The advantage of this method over what others have mentioned is that it does not require either a client-side or a server-side service to be run. So, for instance, if you wanted to implement an IRC client purely in JavaScript but your web host does not allow you sufficient rights to proxy the connection, this Java applet would be the way to go. The only concern is making sure the client has Java installed and allowed.
You can just send data between a client and a server with WebSockets. Simply speaking, the only difference that WebSockets introduces is that the client:
adds some header bytes, like the type of data and the length
adds masks and encodes the data using them
The server also has to add header bytes, but does not need to encode the data.
If you implement the protocol correctly (server side, that is, since the browser already has an implementation), you can use it with ease to send text and binary data. (Although browser support is narrow, especially for the latter.)
The benefit of WebSocket is that it is HTTP based. You can use it also in environments there http proxies are used. Thus Websocket has a higher infrastructure compatibility as plain tcp.
Additionally http/WebSocket is providing you some features which you otherwise have to specify on your own:
Redirect
NAT keepalive
Multiplexing via URI
Framing
If you are asking for some data to be pushed from server it is widely termed as COMET or Reverse Ajax.
Web sockets is still not very popular as there are inherent firewall issues and minimal support yet from popular browsers.
You can take a look at http://www.ape-project.org/ as this is one of the most popular implementations (but native to unix/linux only for now. For windows they suggest using a virtual box or vmware based implementation)
I have a JavaScript code running on internet browser and in the same machine in local host is running a python code.
I need to find a way to communicate between them.
Socket client-server is not possible because JavaScript don´t support sockets.
How to Use Sockets in JavaScript\HTML?: "There is no facility to use general-purpose sockets in JS or HTML. It would be a security disaster, for one."
And communication through server not interest me. I need a direct communication on localhost.
Is there any way to communicate with JavaScript and localhost without sockets?
No, by the definition JavaScript cannot use TCP/IP sockets because that would be super super big security hole in the web security model.
You can use
HTTP requests (AJAX)
WebSockets
WebRTC
... to communicate with localhost. The easiest solution is to spin up a SimpleHTTPServer and then make JavaScript AJAX requests against it.
Please note that these communications might not work with HTML files opened file:// and you might need to use a local dev server.
httprelay.io requires no additional libraries and can be used for simple http client to client communication. In your case on browser side use AJAX calls and on Python side use any HTTP client.
I would like to connect to to irc, icq, sip, etc services using WebSockets.
Assuming I have some sort implementation of those protocols in JavaScript ?
Is that possible? I don't seems to understand limitations of WebSockets comparing to regular sockets.
No, you can't, at least not directly.
WebSockets allow real-time messaging between a browser and a WebSocket server, but they have their own layer 7 protocol for encapsulating those messages.
They don't provide access to a pure TCP (or UDP) socket over which you can implement existing protocols.
Absolutely!
The caveat is that you need something to bridge between the WebSocket transport protocol of the browser and the raw TCP socket of the existing service. For example, something like websockify (disclaimer: I created websockify). Another caveat is that websockify only supports TCP targets (WebSocket is TCP only right now so supporting UDP targets would be a little odd anyways).
The websockify project actually includes two proof of concept HTML/Javascript pages to communicate with IRC and telnet. If you are interested in leveraging websockify to build HTML/Javascript clients for some common TCP protocols, I might even pull them into the websockify repo as examples (assuming they are well coded and under an open source license.
An alternative to websockify is to integrate websocket server-side support directly into the servers you wish to communicate with. It's not all that difficult to add support. WebSocket has a very simple framing and while the handshake is compatible with HTTP servers it's actually much more restricted and simple and doesn't require a full HTTP parser. For example, libvncserver 0.9.9 now supports both regular VNC connections and VNC connections over WebSocket. This allows noVNC (which I also created) to connect directly to a libvncserver based VNC server without requiring websockify.
Inspircd has an unofficial module you can install called m_websockets, to allow connection. A server that has the module installed and setup will allow you to connect to the server via webbsockets.
https://github.com/barosl/inspircd-m_websocket
Extending on #kanaka's websockify, this project seems to do it:
A HTML5 irc-client, made with websocket and websockify.
[Has] support for autojoin, privmsg channel, topic, join, userlist, part, nick.
https://github.com/confact/dunirc
No, not with websockets, but you can with http.
Samy Kamkar gave a black hat talk about this.