Hacker News Reader

Flash has WebSockets?

No. Flash has raw TCP sockets and they are not nice, and unlike WebSockets don't pass through firewalls and proxies well.

View on HN

You can 100% emulate Websockets in Flash if you wanted, essentially librarys like socket.io use a flash fallback that does that. If you do a flash only game/app you probably just avoid the websocket overhead for faster development and better bandwith.

Raw sockets pass through firewalls and proxies exactly as good as websockets.

Not on corporate/school/etc networks they don't.

And avoiding WS and using normal sockets, god no. So much code for error handling and parsing and so on. Message passing is much nicer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com