Chromata is an experiment to determine if it is possible to create a realtime link between a web browser/webapp container and an application instance running on the server. Basically:
- Upon receiving an incoming websocket connection, a new session is started together with an application instance.
- The application builds its initial DOM, hooks events etc, and all updates are sent to the client over the websocket.
- The client displays the received DOM, attaches events etc.
- Events are now sent to the application instance in real-time, while at the same time updated parts of the DOM is sent to the client.
There is a demo app living in the app directory. To test the apphost
part of things, invoke chromata-app --appdir app. You should see the
update frames appearing in the console, together with log information.
To exit, press Ctrl-C.
The websocket proxy relays messages between the browser and an app
instance. You can try the websocket end of things with the wscat
utility (npm install -g wscat).
To launch the demo app, all you have to do is call on bin/chromata:
$ bin/chromata
You can specify the base port using --port and also auto-spawn a
UI using --ui <type>:
$ bin/chromata --ui chrome
The daemon will now spawn, loading the websocket proxy, httpd and related
components. If you used --ui chrome a chrome web application window will
also open, and you will start to see output in the terminal and browser
as the websocket connection is established.
Chromata makes use of haxe to build the javascript for the UI. To rebuild it:
$ haxe build.hxml
A new web/js/chromata.js should now have been created.
- Rolf Rottman's blog post "A command line WebSocket Client" for pointing
me to
wscat- https://blog.grandcentrix.net/a-command-line-websocket-client/