The goban library has built in support for communicating to the Online-Go.com game server. This is the official implementation used by the site itself, so it is a good reference if you are making a third party client.

All of the communication is done via websockets using simple JSON messages.

Messages sent from the client to the server have the following format

[command: string, data: any, id?: number]

where command is one of the commands listed in the [[ClientToServer]] protocol, data is the data associated with that command, and id is an optional request id that will be echoed in a response if a response is requested.

Messages sent from the server to the client have the format

[event_name: string, data: any]

or

[id: number, data?: any, error?: {code: string, message: string}]

where event_name/data is listed in the [[ServerToClient]] protocol, or if the message is a response to a command sent by the client, the id and the data for the response. Exactly one response will be sent for a given command if an id was sent with the request. If no id was sent, no response will be sent (but subsequent named commands can be sent back if appropriate). Responses either have data or error set, never both.

Changes from the Socket.IO implementation.

• Several cleanup updates have been made to remove the need for several old fields and a few messages that are no longer needed. Including these fields will not cause any problems, but below are notes if you want to clean up your code.

• Several cleanup updates have been made that homogenize the type of fields, namely 0/1 booleans are now true/false booleans and id's are always numbers. The server still supports coalescing these fields for backwards compatibility.

• All authentication is now handled via the authenticate message, there is no longer a need for the various chat_auth, incident_auth, etc fields in any of the messages. Those fields are still supported for backwards compatibility, but if the jwt is provided, they are ignored.

• The auth field in all game and review messages is no longer necessary or used

• the player_id field in all game and review messages is no longer necessary or used

• The chat/connect, incident/connect, and notification/connect messages have been removed and are an implicitly called by the authenticate message.

• chat/pm/close and chat/pm/load now accept a { player_id: number } object for consistency. Old clients that simply send a number will still work.

• remote_storage/sync now accepts an object { from: string } for consistency. Old clients that simply send a string will still work.

• user/monitor now accepts an object { user_ids: number[] } for consistency. Old clients that send raw numeric array will still work.

• The cmoves parameter has been renamed to conditional_moves in game/conditional_moves/set. The server still supports the old name for backwards compatibility.