JimBergman.net » website development

WebSocket NOT supported in iPhone OS 4

Jim Bergman — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:58:36 +0000

UPDATE July 2010: since the beta 2 release of iOS4, Apple has disabled websocket support. A few readers pointed this out, so I made a trip to an Apple Store it run a few tests.

Confirmed: iOS4 as it is released reports it does NOT have websocket support.

ORIGINAL POST:

Since the Safari web browser on the iPhone is based on WebKit, it makes sense that at some point support for WebSocket would make it to the iPhone.

Safari on iPhone OS 4 does support WebSocket.

Once OS 4 is available for the iPad, support should be there as well.

Thanks to reader Arun for pointing this out.

Test your web browser for Web Socket support

Jim Bergman — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:34:50 +0000

Google announced an improved way for a web application to communicate with a server. The new method is called Web Sockets. You can read more info here on Web Sockets.

Here is a quick test to see if your web browser supports Web Sockets. At the time this post was published Google Chrome developer channel release 4.0.249.0 is the only browser to support Web Sockets.

Here is the JavaScript code (or right click and save file as WebSocketTest.js):

function WebSocketTest()
{
  if ("WebSocket" in window)
  {
    // Google example code
    //  var ws = new WebSocket("ws://example.com/service");
    //  ws.onopen = function()
    //  {
    //    // Web Socket is connected. You can send data by send() method
    //    ws.send("message to send"); ....
    //  };
    //  ws.onmessage = function (evt) { var received_msg = evt.data; ... };
    //  ws.onclose = function() { // websocket is closed. };
    alert("WebSocket supported here!\r\n\r\nBrowser: " + navigator.appName + " " + navigator.appVersion + "\r\n\r\ntest by jimbergman.net (based on Google sample code)");
  }
  else
  {
    // the browser doesn't support WebSocket
    alert("WebSocket NOT supported here!\r\n\r\nBrowser: " + navigator.appName + " " + navigator.appVersion + "\r\n\r\ntest by jimbergman.net (based on Google sample code)");
  }
}

Sample HTML code (save file as WebSocketTest.html in same folder as .js file above):



JimBergman.net - JavaScript: WebSocketTest



Run WebSocket test

UPDATE:

Result of this test on an Windows 7 PC in Google Chrome v4.0.249.0

Result of this test on an Windows 7 PC in Mozilla Firefox v3.5.5

Result of this test on an Windows 7 PC in Microsoft Internet Explorer v8.0.7100.0

Result of this test on an Apple iPhone in OS 3.1.2

Adding Costco Gas Stations to Google Maps

Jim Bergman — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 10:37:59 +0000

How many time have you gone to search for something on the Internet, and it just wasn’t there?

Many times travelling over the last few years, I’ve wanted to know where there was a Costco gas station along my route. Their gas prices are usually the most competitive in a particular area. Finding a location along your route is hard to do when all you have is a list sorted alphabetically by State and City.

So I took the PDF of Costco Gas Stations from the Costco website, extracted it, massaged the data to import it into a database, converted it into KML, and added it to Google Maps.

View Larger Map

I discovered after importing the data, that Google Maps paginates your data set after 200 entries. Since the original data was sorted by State and the City, all the locations are not shown at once. There are 300 Costco Gas Stations in the list.

A more useful arrangement would be to sort the data by ZIP code, and break it into two sets: East and West. I’ll try to find some time for that in the next week.

There were some data validation problems with the original data set also, mainly having to do with non-plain text characters in the data. For example, 1001 Boul. Jean-Baptiste-Rolland, Saint-Jérôme, Quebec J7Y 4Y7 failed validation. The é and ô had to be changed to e and o.

Disclaimer: I was not asked by Costco to do this, and have no ties other than a common membership.

In what way could this map be improved? Leave your suggestions in the comments.