library

First of all, while there is more or less one stable option for Java, there exist many different libraries for JavaScript and some of them don't interact very well with Docker. As such, I recommend using the socket.io-client client library to implement the socket client.

Docker actually allows you to address your components via the names of their containers. So instead of using localhost or other IP addresses to connect to your container, you should specify the name of the container, for example use the address ws://socketserver:4001 if the name of the container that hosts the server is socketserver and it runs on port 4001. Furthermore, in your docker-compose file, you should make sure that there are no conflicts between exposed ports, and that the relevant port on the server is exposed. After that, your components should be able to interact with each other without any issues.