Communicating with TCP

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) provides the backbone of HTTP communications. With TCP, we can open up interfaces between processes running on separate server hosts and remotely communicate between processes with less overhead and fewer complexities than HTTP.

Node provides us with the net module for creating TCP interfaces. When it comes to scaling, reliability, load balancing, synchronization, or real-time social communications, TCP is a fundamental element.

In this recipe, we're going to demonstrate the sort of foundation needed to communicate between processes over a network by setting up a TCP connection that allows us to remotely monitor and filter HTTP headers of website hits in real time.

Getting ready

We'll need two new files: server.js and monitor.js. Let's place them in a new folder.

How to do it...

First, let's create our first TCP server in server.js as follows:

var net = require('net');
var fauxHttp = net.createServer(function(socket) {
socket.write...