Difference between socket and websocket?

sockets websocket mod-wsgi
Jonathon picture Jonathon · Feb 11, 2011 · Viewed 114.7k times · Source

I'm building web app that needs to communicate with another application using socket connections. This is new territory for me, so want to be sure that sockets are different than websockets. It seems like they're only conceptually similar.

Asking because initially I'd planned on using Django as the foundation for my project, but in the SO post I linked to above it's made very clear that websockets aren't possible (or at least not reliable, even with something like django-websockets) using the preferred Django setup (Apache with mod_wsgi). Yet I've found other posts that casually import Python's socket module for something as simple as grabbing the server's hostname.

So:

  • Are they really different?
  • Is there any reason not to use Django for a project that relies on establishing socket connections with an outside server?

Answer

Pablo Santa Cruz picture Pablo Santa Cruz · Feb 11, 2011

To answer your questions.

  1. Even though they achieve (in general) similar things, yes, they are really different. WebSockets typically run from browsers connecting to Application Server over a protocol similar to HTTP that runs over TCP/IP. So they are primarily for Web Applications that require a permanent connection to its server. On the other hand, plain sockets are more powerful and generic. They run over TCP/IP but they are not restricted to browsers or HTTP protocol. They could be used to implement any kind of communication.
  2. No. There is no reason.

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