Notice: Portal has reached its End-of-Life. Use Cettia.
The Portal is a concise, lightweight and feature-rich JavaScript library for real-time web application development. The Portal provides socket for browser-based and Node.js-based applications that need two-way communication with servers, but also aims to utilize a full duplex connection for modern web application development.
The Portal greatly simplifies things essential to real-time web applications like connection sharing, reply, heartbeat and disconnection detection. The Portal is designed by carefully considering known issues and best practices of real-time web to provide a reliable socket based on its simple protocol.
- Website: http://flowersinthesand.github.io/portal/
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/flowersits
- Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/portal_project
Since this project follows Test Driven Development (TDD) principles well, looking at and running the test suite is a best way to understand the portal deeply. Every test has a title specifying a single behavior and is wrriten in QUnit.
client.js: Tests portal and socket using dummy and mock transport.server.js: Tests transports by interacting with portal server.
In order to run test suite, you need to have Node.js or write your portal server.
Clone this repository or simply download it as a zip and extract it.
git clone https://github.com/flowersinthesand/portal.git
cd portalInstall dependencies. If you are on Windows, you may have trouble in installing Contextify. See a installation guide from jsdom.
npm installStart server on localhost at port 8080 and 8090. Both servers serve static assets but portal server is on 8080.
node test/serverOpen http://localhost:8080 for same origin or http://localhost:8090 for cross origin in a browser.
Type node test/index in other console.
A server passing the test suite is a very portal server. Writing portal server is not such hard. One of the goals of this project from day 1 (jquery-stream) is easy to implement in server-side as simple as dealing with Ajax. As various transports and features are added, it gets harder than dealing with Ajax, but still quite easy comparing to other similar projects.
Anyway, the portal server used to develop portal.js is a good tutorial to write portal server and less than 2KB minified and gzipped though it doesn't matter. Check out server.js.