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Jazz – Apps with Distributed State

jazz.tools

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Re: Jazz – Apps with Distributed State

#81

Post by theanzelm »

softfalcon wrote: post #62
theanzelm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is already persisting and syncing data (fully encrypted) between the cloud and other users. You can think of Jazz as a distributed database itself. The coming-soon badges are about interop with traditional systems and higher level features we will add later. The fundamentals are solved and you can build full multiplayer, local-first apps with it. Does that make sense?

That sounds a lot more promising! Which brings in even more questions. What is the performance of these multiplayer experiences? Can I have 1000+ users all connected to the same chat session? What about 10,000? (these numbers might seem high, but they're what I'm expected to deliver in my day-job)

Eventually, yes! The origin story of Jazz is that I did a lot of experiments and research to convince myself of satisfying performance characteristics. Right now, the pure-TypeScript implementation is not very optimised and I'm very intentionally optimising it as needed for early adopter apps instead of predicting where bottlenecks are. So if you start building a chat app with 10s of thousands of users interacting, we'll make sure that's possible by when you want to launch.

This lets us more easily prioritise features vs performance.

Re: Jazz – Apps with Distributed State

#82

Post by theanzelm »

avodonosov wrote: post #70

Reminded me of the Google Realtime API, killed by google 6 years ago. https://developers.google.com/google-apps/realtime/overview This one is open source, thus hopefully a safer choice.

Even with the high failure rate of startups, I hope I'll do infinitely better than Google's certain product death (plus yeah, it's open source)

Re: Jazz – Apps with Distributed State

#83

Post by scoopr »

ddoolin wrote: post #25
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I had to spam click back like 30 times to get back to this hacker news comment thread Click-and-holding or right-clicking the back button will give you a list of last N URLs in your tab history. This page only generates one auto-redirect, so the HN URL will show up.

Thank you for this. Many years of browser usage and I never knew this.

Such is the years long removal of affordance from the UI. Netscape 4 had a small downwards arrow to indicate a submenu for the backbutton.

Re: Jazz – Apps with Distributed State

#84

Post by theanzelm »

Humphrey wrote: post #55
theanzelm wrote: post #27

Founder here - thanks for posting this! It’s getting late where I am so everyone who has questions please don’t be shy to ask, will elaborate in detail tomorrow!

How does the mesh (zero-server) work under-the-hood? What are some example of applications you see being possible with this library? Your site also mentions either using a central server or not having a server. The first idea that comes to mind (perhaps because of your chat example on the homepage) is a decentralised P2P messaging app - something like Messenger or WhatsApp but is completely free from central servers.

The underlying protocol is peer-to-peer sync, so the mesh is really just a bunch of geographically distributed servers that sync between each other as needed and act as "one giant syncing & persistence peer" for your app - mostly so you can sync stuff between devices even if they're not online at the same time, and to use it like cloud storage (I like to call it "S3 for collaborative data")

Re: Jazz – Apps with Distributed State

#85

Post by janpmz »

My first thoughts after visiting the webiste: People will be quick to create apps with this. But what happens if I want to implement something that is not supported by the framework yet? That is a common problem with frameworks in my experience.

Re: Jazz – Apps with Distributed State

#86

Post by theanzelm »

aboodman wrote: post #53
aboodman wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jazz is decentralized. There is no central server. See: https://x.com/aboodman/status/1843045692736204802

Also Instant is a database (it has queries and so forth, more appropriate for bigger data). I would put Jazz at the document sync side of the spectrum: https://x.com/aboodman/status/1843042582672355834

This is fair, thanks for chipping in, Aaron!

With decentralised I always like to be very precise:

- Jazz is decentralised in a "source of truth" sense. You mutate data locally and sync edits between participants until you reach eventually consistent history (and thus state, as per the underlying CRDTs)

- the protocol is peer-to-peer

- the way you use it typically is in a very centralised way. You use a central sync and persistence peer (either your own, or my distributed Jazz Mesh service) and every device syncs to that. That way devices don't have to be online at the same time to sync

Re: Jazz – Apps with Distributed State

#87

Post by theanzelm »

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote: post #49

Nice. Is there a way to add an rss feed? Can't seem to make the newsletter subscription work (could totally be my fault) Also, do you think there will be a way to use python with it?

I think the email newsletter is broken, sorry! Best way to follow it is Twitter and joining the Discord https://discord.gg/sesjU2W5

I haven't had someone ask for Python yet, but I want to eventually support as many environments as possible. Which use-case do you have in mind?

Re: Jazz – Apps with Distributed State

#88

Post by theanzelm »

gocken wrote: post #41
yawnxyz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very cool! I was there for maybe 2 minutes before HN took the system down :D

Not very cool if it breaks under hardly any load. You'd think they'd test their tech demos on more than a handful of people before launching. This doesn't give much confidence at all in their product.

Looks like it's not load that brought it down but someone posting a 340kb individual message that's triggering a bug because we didn't account for that sort of thing somewhere.

The good thing is we now have an easily reproducible case, thanks HN :)

Re: Jazz – Apps with Distributed State

#90

Post by theanzelm »

janpmz wrote: post #85

My first thoughts after visiting the webiste: People will be quick to create apps with this. But what happens if I want to implement something that is not supported by the framework yet? That is a common problem with frameworks in my experience.

Right now we build features exactly when early adopters need them. What's an example of something you're concerned about?
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