From what I understand, PubNub provides servers around the world who take care of the heavy lifting and all you have to do is deal with publishing / subscribing messages.

So there are servers, you just don't run any yourself and it is all abstracted away by their API.

What they did, in this case, is mock the WebSocket interface (so that they didn't need to rewrite the whole original app) and make it use the PubNub API internally. See https://github.com/pubnub/pubnub-xkcd/blob/master/websocket....

Excellent investigation! You are correct thank you for the explanation here on this thread. Check it out we also needed to remove the server.js file too. No more node needed now. Enjoy!

There are servers, you just don't have to run your own. PubNub is a commercial company with a messaging platform that they have integrated this with.