Consider communicating with Brackets-node using something other than websockets

[peterflynn]

We've received a bunch of reports over the past year from users who can't install extensions and/or can't use Live Preview -- where the cause turned out to be networking-related issues such as antivirus software, firewalls, or HTTPS proxies that blocked the socket connection from Brackets to Brackets-node.

Once file watchers also rely on node, the impact of this issue will be larger than ever before.

Given that general IPC in other apps doesn't seem to have massive known problems with antivirus software, I'm wondering if we could use a different IPC method to exchange the snippets of JSON with Brackets-node...

Here are some examples of bugs that got filed because of this:

• Install extension - Installation failed #6079
• possibly Linux : Problem to install extension #6278
• possibly Mac: Live View Not Working #4228
• Can't install extensions in Brackets only Manually #4688
• https://groups.google.com/d/msg/brackets-dev/qIF0n5BMmqI/UXGQy1j4K6EJ
• some of Error on extension installation. #6188 (the @busykai part, not the original filer)
• Brackets won't connect to Live Preview #5250

[njx]

To @dangoor to track for an architecture discussion. Marking medium priority since we seem to hit this in a number of cases.

[dangoor]

@peterflynn The extension installation case is a bit more complicated. Some of those (like #6188's part from busykai) are not related to Brackets connecting to brackets-node, but rather brackets-node connecting to the registry. I think most of the extension installation problems I've seen have been in that category.

#6079 is a good counter example and I hadn't seen that. It seems bizarre to me that web sockets would be blocked for some reason, but there you have it...

[iwehrman]

@gruehle pointed out that we should at the very least show a warning message on startup if Brackets can't connect to the Node process. File watchers make this especially important.

[gbade]

Hello, i recently started using brackets and just this morning, on starting the IDE, i keep getting a "failed to connect to node.js, extension requires node.js installed"
also -
"[brackets-git] ExpectedError: max connection attempts reached"

But i have node.js installed already. even ran node--version in command and got the current version i'm using - v0.10.15

PS - I am at work and my internet access is through a HTTP proxy. despite that, throughout last week, it did work. Don't know what's the matter now.

[dangoor]

@gbade Are you running Windows XP? Brackets 36 has a problem running node on XP systems.

[gbade]

@dangoor I'm running brackets on Windows 7. I managed to solve the issue by modifying my internet options by bypassing proxy for local server. Although, i did notice that i couldn't install extra extensions from the extension manager.

[dangoor]

@gbade Brackets 37 adds a "proxy" configuration item that will fix the extension manager installation issue. See #6911