At $work, we call these people "problem solvers".

I'm guessing they meant they implemented a websockets application, not the actual protocol.

I'm guessing that too as I had a similar issue in a hobby web project in Python. I wanted instant messaging between users and the time required to read the docs for twisted and port the whole thing over was off putting. I ended up making a message server with Node and Socket IO that's like 50 lines and sends messages to and from clients and the server. It works but it seems a bit of a kludge.

It's this simple if you had come across Tornado:

    class WebSocketHandler(tornado.websocket.WebSocketHandler):
        def on_message(self, message):
            self.write_message("Echo: %s" % message)

I think the problem is that you chose a pretty heavyweight / complicated library.

Ta - maybe I'll give that a go. I didn't really try it. Actually I did glance at some docs for the framework I was using, web2py and it suggested some stuff with Tornado but one version only worked on chrome and another needed flash so presumably wouldn't work with iOS so I thought sod it - node/socket IO is easy and works anywhere.