Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla Labs: TogetherJS

togetherjs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 66 posts

Re: Mozilla Labs: TogetherJS

#31

Post by jkeesh »

This looks fantastic. I just have a question for the author (+ Mozilla). Since this is a hosted service, I'm a bit reluctant to integrate it, because I'm not sure what we should expect from Mozilla on this project. Is this a cool open source project that will get support for a little and then fade away? Is this something that a team is really behind and is going to continue to support and extend? Is it expected that most people will just host their own version? (doesnt seem that hard to do, but there is a lot of appeal in not managing the server for this at all)

If this was from a startup I would expect a free trial and then a pricing page that told me what happened if I had X # of users or Y # of requests, but without that info, it seems there is a lot of missing information. Does Mozilla just plan to keep it hosted indefinitely? Or how do you plan to handle users of different sizes? Our use case now is small, but in choosing to go with this tool (vs. Firebase or something else), the switching costs down the road are relevant.

I'm planning to try it out in a small test either way, I'm just curious about more details on the mozilla-hosted version.

Re: Mozilla Labs: TogetherJS

#32

Post by jeswin »

leephillips wrote: post #14
gbadman wrote: post #11

This is a really cool and ambitious project. Although some mention ShareJS, I would say that the OT portion more closely resembles that employed by Firebase in their Firepad project [1] (in that no centralized server manages ordering and history). Actually, this system has many of the features of Firebase in a self-hosted package. As a user of ShareJS (for the real-time collaboration on Plunker [2]), I can see some i…

I agree that it's cool and ambitious, but it seems to have a large intersection with Google Wave.

It integrates with your existing UI, and not as a separate box like Wave or other plugins. I also like that this is free, open source and _from Mozilla_.

Re: Mozilla Labs: TogetherJS

#33

Post by pjgomez »

Another great project from Mozilla, congratulations. I'll definitely give it a try.

Sorry to blow my own horn, but a few months ago we launched a similar project called Quolony https://quolony.com (we are a small startup from Salamanca, Spain). Right now we are working as a free service and we plan to publish it as open-source in the next few months. People can use it individually using a browser extension or in whole sites including our library. We have avatars, synchronized text selection, private and public chats, persistence, cobrowsing, file transfers and a lot more.

Some samples: https://quolony.com/demos/photomess/ (drag and drop) https://quolony.com/demos/quolony/developers/ (shared demo)

At the low level, we extend the browser event model to make it easier to use it in existing applications.

I hope you guys can give it a try and tell me what you think.

Kudos mozilla!

[EDITED: fixed linked]

Re: Mozilla Labs: TogetherJS

#35

Post by meowface »

gbadman wrote: post #11

This is a really cool and ambitious project. Although some mention ShareJS, I would say that the OT portion more closely resembles that employed by Firebase in their Firepad project [1] (in that no centralized server manages ordering and history). Actually, this system has many of the features of Firebase in a self-hosted package. As a user of ShareJS (for the real-time collaboration on Plunker [2]), I can see some i…

Does anyone know of something like this, but for Markdown?

So, like a collaborative Markdown document editor, as well as a simple way to store those documents and choose them for reading/editing later.

Re: Mozilla Labs: TogetherJS

#37

Post by mburns »

meowface wrote: post #35
gbadman wrote: post #11

This is a really cool and ambitious project. Although some mention ShareJS, I would say that the OT portion more closely resembles that employed by Firebase in their Firepad project [1] (in that no centralized server manages ordering and history). Actually, this system has many of the features of Firebase in a self-hosted package. As a user of ShareJS (for the real-time collaboration on Plunker [2]), I can see some i…

Does anyone know of something like this, but for Markdown? So, like a collaborative Markdown document editor, as well as a simple way to store those documents and choose them for reading/editing later.

https://github.com/JohnMcLear/ep_markdown

Re: Mozilla Labs: TogetherJS

#38

Post by k__ »

derefr wrote: post #24
ianb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On principle we keep the server simple, echoing messages back and forth between clients. In practice it's quite hard for two browsers to connect directly to each other, and while we want to support that kind of architecture in order to get it working we still need to simulate P2P using a server.

> In practice it's quite hard for two browsers to connect directly to each other Isn't this the problem WebRTC abstracts away? Your server should just be a TURN server ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traversal_Using_Relays_around_N... ), shouldn't it?

AFAIK WebRTC just works with the latest Firefox/Chrome and needs a STUN and/or a TURN server.

Re: Mozilla Labs: TogetherJS

#39

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

I'm getting pretty tired of people releasing js libraries and not telling you that they depend on jQuery. You don't just add that script to your page, you add that script and jQuery to your page. Stop assuming everyone already has jQuery, guys.

Re: Mozilla Labs: TogetherJS

#40

Post by fcatalan »

pjgomez wrote: post #33

Another great project from Mozilla, congratulations. I'll definitely give it a try. Sorry to blow my own horn, but a few months ago we launched a similar project called Quolony https://quolony.com (we are a small startup from Salamanca, Spain). Right now we are working as a free service and we plan to publish it as open-source in the next few months. People can use it individually using a browser extension or in whol…

I've been helping test Quolony for a while and the potential for this technology is great. In particular using it as a browser extension with the instant link sharing and cobrowsing gives those otherwise solitary web browsing sessions a certain feel of the metaverse that could be. As the meme goes, this puts Internet on your Internet.
Post reply on HN