braidjs

Braidjs: Synchronization in Javascript

This contains a reference implementation in Javascript of the Braid protocol, which adds synchronization to HTTP.

This implementation is not yet complete, but aims to be fully-functioning and robust enough for production sites.

Read more about braid at https://braid.news!

Running the code

If you have nodejs installed, then set it up with:

npm install

Chat demo

You can run the chat server with:

cd demos/chat
node chat-server.js

Then open a web browser to http://localhost:3009/braidchat (for a websocket connection) or .../braidchat?protocol=http for a backwards-compatible http/1.1 connection.

Wiki demo

You can run the wiki server with:

node demos/wiki/wiki-server.js

And then open http://localhost:3009/<any-path-here>.

Seeing the guts

For any command, you can tell it to print out all network traffic in a table by adding the command-line argument --network to it, like this:

node chat-server.js --network

Then you'll see something like this:

ws: server --> C-j2lm GET     {"key":"/usr","parents":null,"subscribe":{"keep_alive":true}}
ws: server --> C-j2lm WELCOME {"key":"/usr","versions":[{"version":null,"parents":{},"changes":[" = {\"B-0bnyC1mdA9\":\"FirefoxHTTP\"}"]}
ws: C-j2lm --> server WELCOME {"key":"/chat","versions":[],"fissures":[],"parents":null}
ws: C-j2lm --> server WELCOME {"key":"/usr","versions":[],"fissures":[],"parents":null}
ws: C-j2lm --> server SET     {"key":"/usr","patches":["[\"B-0bnyC1mdA9\"] = \"FrefoxHTTP\""],"version":"bz2gyet9cv6","parents":{"66mn2f0vco8":true}}

Running tests:

npm test

If you want to see what it's doing, print out the network traffic with:

npm test network

What if one of the trials crashes? To debug it, re-run that particular trial with:

npm test solo 68

This will re-run trial 68, and print out debugging info so you can find the problem and fix it.

You can also configure parameters to test at the top of test/tests.js.