primus

You could also just use Primus which exposes a Stream compatible wrapper by default for the client and server.

And Primus is nice if you want fallbacks and additional features (like reconnects with randomized exponential back-off).

There has been a lot of success using Node.js with engine.io, socket.io, or take a look at the meta Primus module.

Does any have experiences with Primus they can share?

In Primus you can select only one transformer, listed above by V1, but if something doesn't work, you can just switch it with a single line of code.

I started building a real-time webapp with meteor and had to switch to express + primus which was a much more efficient solution (orders of magnitude).

Lately, I've been using primus [1], which is an API unification layer for socket.io, sockjs, faye, and native websockets.

I decided to use Primus + Multiplex + Emitter.

Arnout Kazemier (the lead dev) is a really nice guy and when I pinged him about the egine.io bug, he pushed out a change to Primus 24 hours later that worked around the bug and let me continue to use engine.io as the transformer.

The ws Node module [4] is apparently "The fastest RFC-6455 WebSocket implementation for Node.js" and receives contributions from 3rd-Eden who is also behind Primus [5].

Furthermore, it is trivial to find offence in the word “primary” as well, especially in a context where master/slave was used previously, just think of “primus inter pares”.

I haven't used Primus, but I really like the idea of offering a layer above the underlying connection engine.

At this point Websockets seem to be reasonably mature, and with Socket.io/Primus/etc are dead easy to use, and allow for near-real-time 2 way communication.

However, in this case you're then adding a dependency on Primus.