Web browsers support [1] what's called the WebSocket API [2], which allows browsers to create socket connections to a socket server.
But many programming languages also provide a library to create socket connections on the server. This is what most reddit bots would be doing, as demonstrated in the rockets-client [3], which uses a Node.js websocket library called 'ws'.
So it's incredibly flexible. You could wrap a UI around it in the browser, or use it server-side with any mainstream programming language that supports websockets.
Web browsers support [1] what's called the WebSocket API [2], which allows browsers to create socket connections to a socket server.
But many programming languages also provide a library to create socket connections on the server. This is what most reddit bots would be doing, as demonstrated in the rockets-client [3], which uses a Node.js websocket library called 'ws'.
So it's incredibly flexible. You could wrap a UI around it in the browser, or use it server-side with any mainstream programming language that supports websockets.
[1] http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets [2] http://www.websocket.org/aboutwebsocket.html [3] https://github.com/rtheunissen/rockets-client