What is the proper way to manage multiple chat rooms with socket.io?

Question

What is the proper way to manage multiple chat rooms with socket.io?

So on the server there would be something like:

io.sockets.on(\'connection\', functi         


        

Answer 1

Update: Both Now.js and Bridge are now dead, see now.js dead and bridge dead. Socket.io seems to have adopted the callback feature as of v0.9, which is a good step forward.

While it isn't directly Socket.io related, Now.js (a higher level abstraction ontop of Socket.io) supports groups - http://nowjs.com/doc

They have a multi-room-chat example in their offocial repo here: https://github.com/Flotype/now/blob/master/examples/multiroomchat_example/multiroomchat_server.js

Answer 2

Socket.IO v0.7 now gives you one Socket per namespace you define:

var room1 = io.connect('/room1');
room1.on('message', function () {
    // chat socket messages
});
room1.on('disconnect', function () {
    // chat disconnect event
});

var room2 = io.connect('/room2');
room2.on('message', function () {
    // chat socket messages
});
room2.on('disconnect', function () {
    // chat disconnect event
});

With different sockets, you can selectively send to the specific namespace you would like.

Socket.IO v0.7 also has concept of "room"

io.sockets.on('connection', function (socket) {
  socket.join('a room');
  socket.broadcast.to('a room').send('im here');
  io.sockets.in('some other room').emit('hi');
});

Source: http://socket.io/#announcement