What is botframework-streaming?
The botframework-streaming npm package is part of the Microsoft Bot Framework and provides functionality for streaming data between bots and channels. It allows for efficient, real-time communication by enabling bots to send and receive data streams, which is particularly useful for scenarios involving large payloads or continuous data transfer.
What are botframework-streaming's main functionalities?
Streaming Connections
This feature allows you to create a named pipe server that can accept streaming connections. The code sample demonstrates how to set up a named pipe server and handle incoming connections and messages.
const { NamedPipeServer } = require('botframework-streaming');
const server = new NamedPipeServer('mypipe');
server.start();
server.on('connection', (connection) => {
console.log('New connection established');
connection.on('message', (message) => {
console.log('Received message:', message);
});
});
WebSocket Connections
This feature allows you to create a WebSocket server for streaming data. The code sample demonstrates how to set up a WebSocket server, start it, and handle incoming connections and messages.
const { WebSocketServer } = require('botframework-streaming');
const server = new WebSocketServer({ port: 8080 });
server.start();
server.on('connection', (connection) => {
console.log('New WebSocket connection established');
connection.on('message', (message) => {
console.log('Received message:', message);
});
});
Streaming Data
This feature allows you to stream data to a server. The code sample demonstrates how to create a named pipe client, connect to a server, and send a message.
const { NamedPipeClient } = require('botframework-streaming');
const client = new NamedPipeClient('mypipe');
client.connect().then(() => {
console.log('Connected to server');
client.send({ type: 'message', text: 'Hello, server!' });
});
Other packages similar to botframework-streaming
ws
The ws package is a simple to use, blazing fast, and thoroughly tested WebSocket client and server for Node.js. It provides similar WebSocket server and client functionalities as botframework-streaming but does not include named pipe support.
socket.io
Socket.IO is a library that enables real-time, bidirectional, and event-based communication between web clients and servers. It offers more features than botframework-streaming, such as automatic reconnection, rooms, and namespaces, but is primarily focused on WebSocket communication.
websocket
The websocket package provides a WebSocket server and client for Node.js. It supports both WebSocket and WebSocket Secure (WSS) protocols. While it offers similar WebSocket functionalities, it does not support named pipes like botframework-streaming.
This library contains the core of Bot Framework Streaming Extensions, which extends the 3.0 Bot Framework protocol to communicate over multiplexed, persistent, connections such as named pipes or WebSocket.
Installing
To add the latest published version of this package to your bot:
npm install --save botframework-streaming
Use the Daily Build
To get access to the daily builds of this library, configure npm to use the MyGet feed before installing.
npm config set registry https://botbuilder.myget.org/F/botbuilder-v4-js-daily/npm/
To reset the registry in order to get the latest published version, run:
npm config set registry https://registry.npmjs.org/