CometD and NodeJS, part 2

In our previous blog, we presented the case of a Webtide customer, Genesys, that needed to integrate CometD in NodeJS and how we developed a CometD client capable of running in the NodeJS environment.
In this article we present the other side of the solution, that is, how we implemented the CometD NodeJS Server. Leveraging this, Genesys was able to use the standard CometD JavaScript Client in the browser front-end application to talk to the CometD NodeJS server application, which in turn used the CometD NodeJS Client to talk to the Java CometD server application.
The CometD NodeJS Server is based on the same CometD concepts present in the CometD Java server.
In particular, there is a central object, the CometDServer, that handles HTTP requests and responses provided by the NodeJS environment. The CometDServer object is also a repository for sessions and channels, that are the two primary concepts used in a server-side CometD application. Both sessions and channels emit events that an application can listen to in order to implement the required business logic.
Installing the CometD NodeJS Server is easy:

npm install cometd-nodejs-server

The minimal setup of a CometD NodeJS Server application is the following:

var http = require('http');
var cometd = require('cometd-nodejs-server');
var cometdServer = cometd.createCometDServer();
var httpServer = http.createServer(cometdServer.handle);
httpServer.listen(0, 'localhost', function() {
    // Business logic here.
});

Now you can use the CometD NodeJS Server APIs to be notified when a message arrives on a certain channel:

var channel = cometdServer.createServerChannel('/service/chat');
channel.addListener('message', function(session, channel, message, callback) {
    // Your message handling here.
    // Invoke the callback to signal that handling is complete.
    callback();
});

Further examples of API usages can be found at the CometD NodeJS Server project.
With the CometD NodeJS Client and Server projects, Genesys was able to leverage CometD throughout the whole process chain, from the browser to NodeJS to the Java CometD server. This allowed Genesys the use of a consistent API throughout the whole architecture, with the same concepts and a very smooth learning curve for developers.