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The Power of Pure HTTP – screen share, real-time messaging, SSH and VNC

Ryo Ota on December 17, 2020

Hi all. Today, I'd like to show you the power of pure HTTP stream, which allows us to do screen sharing, video chatting, real-time text messaging, ...

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Ilya Nevolin • Dec 17 '20

Wonderful, I love all of this!

Remote control for a Windows machine would a great addition though, not sure how realistic that would be to implement, guess I'll have to use Teamviewer/AnyDeks for now.

Another thing that spikes my interest is SSH in the browser, but I'm using key pairs instead of user:pass method, is that possible with this?

cubiclesocial • Dec 19 '20

For SSH in the browser, yes, it is possible to use SSH keys. I support both methods in File Tracker:

file-tracker.cubiclesoft.com/

It uses a combination of (WebSocket-based):

github.com/cubiclesoft/php-app-ser...

And the beta async support from:

github.com/cubiclesoft/php-ssh

To provide two-way, async communication with a SSH host.

Pratik Dhaboo • Dec 18 '20

May be we can use robot.js alongside the screen share to transmit mouse and keyboard events.

marataziat • Dec 18 '20

Very cool! Websockets sucks because you need to do 2 things to sync the user: rest api request to get the initial data, and websocket connection to receive events. So you need to do 2 things to keep the user in sync. You can not push initial data via websocket when user connects because of websocket data framing.

This is also a good replacement for SSE.

I also hope http 3 support will be there soon, so there will be more stuff to explore for real time apps.

Sm0ke • Dec 17 '20

Unconventional niceeee ...

Duy K. Bui • Dec 20 '20

I can see a lot of potentials in this approach. Thanks for the detailed post and ready-to-use sample resources.

I have a few questions:

What would be the strategy to handle disconnect / reconnect to guarantee no loss of data?
From what I understand, we can easily support multi-poster and multi-getter against the same "stream" without complications. Is that correct? Are there any pitfalls I have not recognized?

mickeyklai • Dec 19 '20

Wow!
Very good and informative article!
Thank you🙏

One question that popped into my mind during reading this is wether it's possible to transport tcp over Piping server, similary to ssh over http scenario?

cubiclesocial • Dec 19 '20

This is fairly reminiscent of my PHP Cool File Transfer project where I did something similar a few years ago:

github.com/cubiclesoft/php-cool-fi...

One client basically creates a mini-TCP server inside a PHP script on the server and another client somewhere else connects to the mini-TCP server and receives the file as a direct transfer. PHP emits a byte every second to keep the connection alive for the person who is sending the file until the second client connects and accepts or rejects the file. If the file is accepted, then it starts transferring. The web server doesn't store any data - it just sends the data to the other side. The setup of a temporary TCP/IP server per file is somewhat exotic.

There is a slight gotcha with the approach: A GET method caller never finishes as can be seen in the "Simple text messaging" example for Piping Server where the loading indicator never stops spinning. That means onload won't fire in that case. In the instance of a file download, the download manager takes over and handles the request. The solution is to wait until the page has finished loading and then make a XHR request.

Mikael Gramont • Dec 21 '20

What a cool project.
That's the nice thing about tools that the leverage existing web ecosystem, the results can be really impressive while at the same time everyone is like "wait, yeah, of course, that should have been obvious".