nowjs stops responding

[juzerali]

I created a demo chat app (link) from the code available at nowjs.org. Everything works as expected initially. But if I leave the window open for few hours I am simply unable to send any message. There is no http or ws request being sent to the server. I get the following error in browsers javascript console. Tried different browsers, result is the same. is it that nowjs kills the connection after a specified period of time?

Uncaught TypeError: Object #<Object> has no method 'distributeMessage'
now.receiveMessagepagescript.js:5
d.event.handlejquery.min.js:16
d.event.add.m.k.handle.m

If I refresh the page or open the page in another tab things resume as normal.

This might be a possible duplicate of issue #145 but not sure.

[steveWang]

Likely a Socket.IO "feature".

We delete all remote functions when you disconnect, which is why you see the error.

My guess is that Socket.IO forces said disconnect, which doesn't trigger a reconnect.

(also, not a duplicate.)

[juzerali]

What do you mean by 'disconnect'? Like I said, I simply leave the browser idle, I don't close the window. When does the 'disconnect' event fires?

[steveWang]

Socket.IO timeout.

[juzerali]

Is there any way to get around it and make a long lived session. Also does any event fires on client-side on disconnect so that I can hide all UIs on disconnect?

[steveWang]

Last time I tried, Socket.IO insisted on having things its way, despite much pleading / tweaking of options. I think the closest I got was setting some settings (closeTimeout and some other ones, perhaps?) to arbitrarily high values. Generally a bad idea.

Regarding your second question: now.core.on('disconnect', cb) does what you'd expect it to.

[juzerali]

Since nowjs is built on top of socket.io, socket.io's limitations will limit nowjs as well. Can we free nowjs from the dependency on socket.io?

[steveWang]

There was a very brief & short-lived experiment at the end of last summer, but since there was a total of 20 or so developer-hours put into said project, it didn't really go anywhere.

SockJS might be a possibility, but I'm not sure how much effort it would be to switch over.

[juzerali]

Hmmm, does that mean that with current implementation, nowjs is not production ready?

[jameskeane]

I have ported now.js to SockJS @ https://github.com/jameskeane/now/tree/sockjs

The only thing I haven't completed yet is session support.