Transforming your current project to use Primus is not as hard as you might think. The API’s in Primus are really similar to the one’s your currently using in framework X. We’ve prepared some small migration guides to make it even easier!
socket.send: Use thesocket.writemethod.socket.volatile: No known replacement, but did not work as intended in Socket.IO either so I don't assume this as a big losssocket.json.send: Use thesocket.writemethod, the encoding is done by default.
If you’ve been using Socket.IO quite heavily you might notice that there are some features from Socket.IO that are missing in Primus. The reason that these features are not implemented is that we want to keep core light so it's easier to maintain and fix bugs. But! All of these missing features can be re-introduced in Primus using plugins! Our amazing community has stepped up and created a couple of small and reusable modules that add this missing functionality.
Primus doesn’t have a concept of rooms. If you are using the socket.join and
socket.leave methods in your code you can install the primus-rooms plugin:
npm install --save primus-rooms
After installing you can add the plugin using:
primus.plugin('rooms', require('primus-rooms'));And now you can join and leave rooms again. Manually leaving rooms when the user disconnects isn't necessary, the plugin handles this for you. For more information checkout the project on GitHub:
https://github.com/cayasso/primus-rooms
In Socket.IO you have a special server.of method which creates a new
namespace. There are some problems with this namespace implementation and that
is that these namespaces are static and once they are created the live for the
duration of your application. The plugins that introduce multiplexing in Primus
do not suffer from this, making them more flexible and powerful. There are two
different plugin you can use for multiplexing, there is substream which is
maintained by the Primus project or you can use primus-multiplex.
There are different modules that re-introduce the emit method. You could use
the primus-emit module which is build and maintained by the Primus project or
the primus-emitter. The main different between these modules is the size of
the code and the method that its using to emit events. The primus-emit module
uses the same emit method to trigger events on the server and client while the
other module uses a send method. The primus-emit module is smaller in size
while the primus-emitter module is required by other plugins.
“A wish decision, you must make, young padawan” -- Yoda
In this guide we’re going to be using the primus-emit plugin as it has
complete API compatibility with Socket.IO. We install this module using:
npm install --save primus-emit
And the only thing we need to do to use it to add the plugin to the Primus server using:
primus.plugin('emit', require('primus-emit'));