Recently, there was a gif trending on social networks displaying an amazing piece of art made by Bjorn Staal.
I wanted to recreate it, but lacki...
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You probably should use BroadcastChannel API for this purpose instead of ServiceWorker, not only because it serves the purpose better, but also in spite of perfomance.
Accordingly to this article, you may gain some performance by using
BroadcastChannelif you send small amount of data per message:hacks.mozilla.org/2015/07/how-fast...
This is my little research, I didn't test it, so let me know if I'm wrong.
Oh ! I didn't know about this API, thanks for sharing it !
tbh i didn't really care about the performance here , but that sounds clearly like a better tool for this ( as the SharedWorker only re-broadcast on each sync )
Thanks for the finding, i'll try it out !
I recently wrote about this topic also, but about sharing state between tabs instead of windows (but same concept). What I found is that BroadcastChannel is not sufficient for this, because there is no straightforward way to sync the state when the window is first opened.
What straightforward means in this case?
Well think for a second for a way how you could possibly get initial state with BroadcastChannel. One way would be to have a 'get_state' message, upon which each channel responds with a 'set_state' message. But this would result in every single channel sending out a message, which is not optimal and could even be less performant than a shared worker. If it were possible to have communication between exclusively 2 channels then it would be different though.
That's just one request at the time connection happens, comparing to the fact that 100 messages per second could be sent while moving windows around, this one time connection ping-pong is nothing.
You can also cache the state in a
localStorage, so when any new connection appears, it can be simply read from it (though this will require usingJSON.parse()).So why do you think this is a problem? Maybe performance one, but setup load time is tolerable since users usually don't get mad when something loading for the first time.
BroadcastChannels are really nice. I used it for sharing data across multiple tabs and it was great. Not only you can send small messages but complex objects with circular references and al lot of information really fast (much faster than serializing it to json and back).
This is what I was looking for in the article. But the article also mentioned several ways to share state and they are interesting either.
Great article ☺️
Did you know when storage is updated by another tab it fires an event? Which will save you needing to poll.
Here is a version I made
github.com/Link2Twenty/spyglass
Here is the local storage hook I used (and wrote)
github.com/bloc-digital/uselocalst...
I've seen this in a Chrome Experiment something like 10 years ago, and since then I have been wondering how it was possible. This article explains everything, thank you
Oh, If you still have the link of the chrome experiment I'd be grateful ! But yeah I basically saw the gif from Bjorn and I was mesmerized !
If you found this article interesting, don't hesitate to share it with your friends/coworkers/community ! ( you can also subscribe to my newsletter notachraf.substack.com/ ! )
Now that I remember it was different, it was a ball running across windows.
Here is the link: experiments.withgoogle.com/browser...
The experiment is not launchable but there are videos, that's pretty cool!
ohhh that's fun, maybe i'll try recreating something like that ! thanks for sharing !
I think you can contact Mark Mahoney personally to have the source code. It was available a time ago
Wow!!! This is so freaking cool. Appreciate you sharing.
I really like the bouncing ball experiment that @crisz brought up elsewhere in thread. I can imagine a lot of interesting ideas based on this concept...
For instance, I'd love to see some sort of a virtual ant farm with ants crawling between overlapped windows. Or maybe a program for making digital collages. What if one window was a magnifying glass that you could pull over another window?
I'm thinking there's gotta be some gaming potential here too.
You got my imagination running with this one! Very cool stuff. 😀
Thanks for the comment ! Happy to have sparkled some ideas ! I'd love to see what you do with this !
I actually imagined a game where one window is a maze, and the other window is a source of light, so you need to move one window to illuminate the maze and navigate it ( never had the time to actually finish it )
but yeah, feel free to share whatever you do with this ! ( and my source code is ofc open source, so if you need a starting block you can use it directly ! )
If thinking about smoothness of actions, you probably should use
requestAnimationFrameto long-polllocalStoragefor updates, this should give a user the best experience.yeah you're absolutly right i think, I actually had a version using requestAnimationFrame, but I was worried it introduced too many concepts in the same article , but in more advanced projects ( like the one in 3D ) clearly the best thing to do is to schedule the polling in the next microTask ( and not a task like setTimeout )
I don't think that's a problem for such articles, they are to demonstrate an approach and methods used to deal with problems.
you could incorporate this into a lib that enables this to work over the internet without using a server using p2p networks.
it needs a unique string to connect all nodes in same "room" then all nodes can exchange messages.So you can render position of all connected to the room nodes.
Overcoming the limitation of localhost only..
bugout
oh that's actually a really clever idea, I never deepdived onto the WebRTC API , I'll try it out and maybe write an article about it !
I made a quick test to adapt your logic with the use of BroadcastChannel API here github.com/Axiol/linked-windows-br...
It's a first draft, lots of things can probably be improved, but it works
Damn that's impressive! Great work! It's way more compact, I think that's the most adapted way of doing it, do you mind if I edit the article to showcase and link to your work?
Sure, no problem. I'll see if I have to time to clean everything a bit
It's quite fascinating.
I imagined sharing a single WebSocket or SSE connection across multiple windows using SharedWorker, but unfortunately, it's not supported in Android Chrome, which is disappointing.
Oh, that's a great application of SharedWorkers actually, a lot of companies put their caching logic inside of SharedWorkers
I didn't know it was not yet supported on Android, that's a bummer :(
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Inspiring post, thank you!
I was wandering if there are any solutions to share state between multiple clients or even between client and server (which would need to distinguish multiple running sessions). Might be simple if you can accept a low timing, but what, if you want a fast response time?
Awesome article! Very good an interesting content.
Thanks ! I'll be dropping more in the next coming weeks, if you don't to miss anything, you can also subscribe for my newsletter, it's free : notachraf.substack.com/ !
Sure!
This is super cool!
I am not found of sharing my screen info with any website. How to disable this API?
Honestly, there is no easy way I think , but I have some ideas for you :
Edit : actually I just made an article to use proxies, if you want to read : dev.to/notachraf/create-your-own-i...
This is impassive. I saw the demo, and knowing how it was done is magical. Thank you.
Awesome article! Would be fun to try it out!!
Awesome, a new level unlocked!
cool proof of concept :)
Good job 👏
Awesome content bro, really helpful 💖
Glad I could be of help !
I'll be dropping more in the next coming weeks, if you don't to miss anything, you can also subscribe for my newsletter, it's free : notachraf.substack.com/ !
Good
Very interesting article, if I were to do this I would dread having to do the math lol
hahaha, I messed up so much the signs on the base change, but a bit of try and retry makes it work !
Honestly I think that the ones making it in 3D have so much more complicated math 🤯
Cool 😎
Web never stops being fascinating 🚀
Great Article,thanks for sharing :)
wow good idea
Holy Sh**!
This is awesome 😎. Really awesome work dude.
Thanks for the comment ! I'll be dropping more in the next coming weeks, if you don't to miss anything, you can also subscribe for my newsletter, it's free : notachraf.substack.com/ !
When I saw the animation by Bjorn, I immediately thought of local storage.
Thanks for introducing a new concept of shared workers. Loved it!
Is there a way to do this with the Ruby programming language?
Sorry I don't know a lot of Ruby to do it ! But maybe with webassembly ?