Seriously - this thing is so unstable it should have a negative version number. Feel free to play with it, but keep tabs on this repo as I stabilize it.
postal.socket is a plugin for postal.js. It wraps socket.io both in the browser and in node.js to connect two instances of postal - a client/browser instance and a server/node instance. The 'websocket' bridge can then be used by browser clients to subscribe to server-side postal channels, as well as publish remotely (publish on client, forward over the socket to the server).
Browser
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Node
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// get a handle to a remote channel
// third arg with { type: "websocket" } tells postal to use the SocketChannel
// which the plugin registers under postal.channelTypes (normal default is LocalChannel)
var remoteChannel = postal.channel( "SomeChannel", "Some.Topic", { type: "websocket" });
// subscribe to the remote channel
var sub = remoteChannel.subscribe( function( data, env ) { console.log( JSON.stringify( env ) ); });
// publish locally and remotely
remoteChannel.publish({ greeting: "Oh, hai", moar: "This will get published locally and remotely" });Currently postal.socket only enables remote channel functionality if you use an actual channel object (via postal.channel). You cannot publish or subscribe over the socket using the shortcut postal.subscribe or postal.publish methods. You can, however, publish to the socket connection directly by calling postal.connections.socket.publish(), passing in a valid postal envelope. This will not publish locally, but only to the remote socket listener(s). Hey, I did say it was experimental, didn't I?
This plugin is proof-of-concept. The focus has been on clients subscribing to server-side channels, with the ability to publish remotely as well. However, no infrastructure is in place for the server to subscribe to remote-client channels. Now that I've proven the concept, this plugin will probably get a ground-up-rewrite to support two way subscription proxying and publishing.