Why do we need products like Pusher and Socket.io to establish a websocket connection?

Question

I\'ve been reading about websockets and SaaS like Pusher and Socket.io recently, while working on my Laravel chat practice application. What I don\'t understand is, why do we ne

Answer 1

Short answer? You don't have to use them. Knock yourself out writing your own server and client side websocket implementation.

Longer answer.

Why use Laravel? I can do all that with straight up PHP.

Why use Vue? I can do all that with vanilla javascript.

We use libraries and frameworks because they abstract away the details of implementation and make it easier to build products. They handle edge cases you don't think of or things you don't even know that you don't know about because they are used by thousands or millions of developers and all the knowledge and bugs they have encountered and fixed are baked into the implementation.

This is one of the hallmarks of software engineering, code reuse. Don't repeat yourself and don't write any software you don't have to. It allows you to focus on building a solution for your particular requirements, and not focus on building a bunch of infrastructure before you can even build your solution.

I've never used Pusher, but it looks like, yes, it is a SaaS product. But Socket.io is open source.