Mozilla Labs: TogetherJS (opens in new tab)

[Author here] The big way TogetherJS differs from many of the other realtime products out there, like Firebase or (to a lesser degree) ShareJS, is that it doesn't do any storage. It coordinates real-time sessions, but it's not there to take the place of the application, instead it augments the application. If your application has persistence, it has traditional persistence. Whatever auth system you have is your own. At the same time while it dodges any persistence, it extends the scope beyond what those other tools typically do to include more with session management and the standard tools that I think are needed for collaboration. There's nothing exciting about text chat, but you need it anyway.

Still, ignoring persistence I think will help keep the surface area of the TogetherJS smaller compared to some other tools. Or at least focused on other things.

People have mentioned the idea of being able to chop TogetherJS up before, but I have a hard time seeing how that would actually work. For instance, the architecture is built around a pretty dumb server, so hooking into Streams would seem counter to that principle. And just allowing for the possibility would add a lot of complexity. Ultimately the UI is actually the bulk of what makes up the TogetherJS code (or maybe it's the part I find hard and so I feel like I spend a lot of time with it), and I don't know how to make this kind of UI while being modular. Without the UI I don't think it's nearly as compelling a project (becomes more like ShareJS, or Firebase, or Google Drive Realtime API – neat but a big investment, and sometimes only appropriate for greenfield projects.

Anyway, I'm certainly interested in how people want to extend or integrate with TogetherJS. I'm skeptical of splitting it up into pieces, as it is theoretically easier to do things that way, but I expect in practice it will just leave a confusing pile of pieces that aren't fun to put back together. But that doesn't mean that there aren't use cases worth exploring... and with some creativity there might be other approaches to handling those cases.

It doesn't seem to be a P2P system, since it requires a server. According to the docs, "This server does not rewrite the messages or do much of anything besides pass the messages between the participants" [1] , so it's not really P2P.

I'm fairly sure the Firebase requires a server too... (their server, or else they couldn't charge for it).

[1] https://togetherjs.com/docs/#technology-overview

We provide wysiwyg editor integration (Aloha-Editor) with presence and remote cursor. We are working on a hosted/downloadable service with low-level data-sync api and high level wiki features: https://wikidocs.com

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.

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

The server is fairly trivial. It's mostly there to make it easy to try. If you want to host the server, go ahead (source is on github).

Actually, after testing some more, it does not work. jqueryUI dialogs are prevented to open (for one thing). And, since I change the url hash, it likely messes with the changes introduced by togetherJS ... which, currently, prevents it from working collaboratively. Still, neat idea - especially if I can get it to work.

yes: https://twitter.com/mozlabs/status/380847329437159424

wonder if they might to add some kind of drawing/annotation tools

Yes. See the name change announcement from earlier today: https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2013/09/reintroducing-together... . “We wanted a name that reflects the wider scope of how to use the tools.”

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.

Tried to enter as "guest"

    exception 'Q\Exception' with message 'Invalid auth provider' in /data/quolony/1.1.beta.1785/code/lib/Quolony/q.core.php:2444
    Stack trace:
    #0 [internal function]: Q\{closure}(Object(Q\Exception))
    #1 {main}

File a bug?

Look here: https://togetherjs.com/docs/contributing.html#hosting-the-hu...

I think this is what you want: https://github.com/mozilla/togetherjs/wiki/Hosting-the-Hub-S...

Have a look at this: http://substance.io/

I'm working on something similar: https://wikidocs.com. Although our's closed source at the moment (can't say whether or not it will remain closed), we will provide a downloadable package you can run yourself.

http://simperium.com/ is exactly what you need. It serves as a real-time data layer; you can push/pull from it from the browser, and pull/push to it from your server too.

Check out http://firepad.io, it's an open source project that uses Firebase on the backend. You could use that as a starting point and then put together your own backend.

give http://etherpad.org/ a shot

Both people are accessing the website as themselves. If one person doesn't have permission to see a page, for instance, then they won't see it. And yeah, whoever hits save is the saver ;) Doing something richer than that requires application-specific integration, which we want to support, but we also want to take cues from developers about what that should actually look like. This is one idea we have along these lines: https://github.com/mozilla/togetherjs/issues/372

Here's a bookmarklet I threw together. You can go to the link given by someone else and then click the bookmarklet to join their session. It messes up if you change pages, though. Maybe there's a way to fix that.

Pretty interesting that it maps reactive UI elements like bootstrap divs which resize properly!

<a href="javascript:( function(){ var%20s=document.createElement('script'); s.setAttribute('src','https://togetherjs.com/togetherjs-min.js'); document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].appendChild(s); setTimeout(function(){ TogetherJS(this); }, 100); })();">LINK</a>

IE10 has WebSockets: http://caniuse.com/websockets – but TogetherJS doesn't support IE10 either (simply haven't been able to keep up testing with IE in addition to other browsers).