@firebase/webchannel-wrapper

What is @firebase/webchannel-wrapper?

The @firebase/webchannel-wrapper package is a part of the Firebase platform, specifically designed to provide a robust networking layer by wrapping the Google Closure Library's implementation of WebChannel. WebChannels facilitate bi-directional communication between client and server over the web. This package is particularly used within Firebase to support real-time data synchronization and other network interactions in web applications.

What are @firebase/webchannel-wrapper's main functionalities?

Real-time Data Synchronization

This feature allows for real-time data synchronization between the client and server. The code sample demonstrates how to set up a WebChannel, listen for messages from the server, and send a data request to the server.

import { WebChannel } from '@firebase/webchannel-wrapper';

const channel = new WebChannel('https://example.com/data', {json: true});
channel.listen('onmessage', (message) => {
  console.log('Data received:', message);
});
channel.send({ request: 'fetchData' });

Network Error Handling

This feature provides robust error handling mechanisms for network communications. The code sample shows how to listen for and handle network errors using the WebChannel.

import { WebChannel } from '@firebase/webchannel-wrapper';

const channel = new WebChannel('https://example.com/data');
channel.listen('onerror', (error) => {
  console.error('Network error occurred:', error);
});

Other packages similar to @firebase/webchannel-wrapper

socket.io

Socket.io is a popular real-time communication library that enables real-time, bi-directional communication between web clients and servers. It uses WebSocket as a transport mechanism but falls back to older polling methods for compatibility. Compared to @firebase/webchannel-wrapper, socket.io is more versatile in terms of transport support and is not tied to any specific backend service.

signalr

SignalR is a library for ASP.NET developers that simplifies the process of adding real-time web functionality to applications. Like @firebase/webchannel-wrapper, it supports real-time bi-directional communication but is specifically designed for the .NET ecosystem, making it more specialized compared to the more platform-agnostic approach of the Firebase package.

README

@firebase/webchannel-wrapper

NOTE: This is specifically tailored for Firebase JS SDK usage, if you are not a member of the Firebase team, please avoid using this package

This is a wrapper of some Webchannel Features for the Firebase JS SDK.

Installation

You can install this wrapper by running the following in your project:

$ npm install @firebase/webchannel-wrapper

Usage

The following 5 modules are exposed for use:

• createWebChannelTransport
• ErrorCode
• EventType
• WebChannel
• XhrIoPool

You can include these by doing the following:

ES Modules

import { WebChannel } from '@firebase/webchannel-wrapper'

// Do stuff with WebChannel

CommonJS Modules

const webchannelWrapper = require('@firebase/webchannel-wrapper');

// Do stuff with webchannelWrapper.ErrorCode, webchannelWrapper.EventType, etc