tcstream is a system for streaming messages with low latency from an HTTP server to a browser using only HTTP requests with chunked replies. The initial (and only) server implementation is built in Erlang as a Webmachine resource. The client is written in JavaScript and presents a interface similar to Socket.IO.
You probably should use Websockets. tcstream was created at a time when Websockets were under heavy development and browser support was spotty, at best. In particular, IE8 was a target for the platform that makes use of tcstream.
If you need to support really, really old browsers, or otherwise don't want to (or cannot) use Websockets, then tcstream may be for you.
Some notes:
- tcstream is unidirectional. It is designed to efficiently send messages from the server to the browser. The other direction may be handled via standard POSTs, PUTs, etc.
Coming soon!
Coming soon!
This work is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. See LICENSE at the root of this repository.
The tcst_file_resource module was copied from the webmachine-demo repository to serve static files for the test harness. Thanks Basho!