Breaking the Code Behind Realtime Collaboration With Websockets

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Figma, Google Docs, Miro, and several other tools allow you to see in real time what a person is doing, but how? In this talk, you’ll get to know the concept of event-brokers, pubsub design pattern, web sockets. We will unravel these features and understand how to make them.

This talk has been presented at JSNation US 2024, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.

FAQ

Vitor Norton is a Brazilian developer advocate at SuperViz and a 10-time Microsoft MVP, passionate about connecting people and remote work.

Collaborative components are tools that enhance real-time collaboration and connectivity among users, such as mouse pointers sync, online status indicators, and real-time updates in applications like Gather Town and Miro.

The mouse pointer feature works by synchronizing the position of users' cursors in real-time using a combination of React components, event listeners, and WebSockets for fast, bidirectional communication.

WebSockets enable continuous two-way communication between clients and servers, allowing real-time updates with low latency and persistent connections, ideal for chat and live updates.

Vitor Norton values remote work because it allows him to work from anywhere in the world, aligning with his passion for connecting people and utilizing productivity tools.

Examples include Gather Town for a game-like interactive workspace, Miro for collaborative whiteboarding, Figma for design collaboration, and Microsoft Teams for meeting coordination.

CRDT, or Conflict-Free Data Types, is a data structure that allows synchronization of data across devices without conflicts, crucial for building reliable real-time collaborative applications.

The PubSub pattern, or publish-subscribe pattern, is a design pattern where messages are sent (published) and received (subscribed) by parties in a system, facilitating asynchronous and decoupled communication.

Resources include "CRDT-R Collaborative Protocol of the Future" by Piyush Pourwell on Medium, "Learning JavaScript Design Patterns" by Addy Oslanyi, "How to Use WebSockets with Flutter" on DevTool, and "Understanding and Implementing Event-Driven Communication and Development" by Vitor Norton.

Vitor Norton
Vitor Norton
20 min
21 Nov, 2024

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Video Summary and Transcription
Hello, I'm Vitor Norton, a developer advocate at SuperViz. I'm passionate about connecting people, highly dependent on my productivity tools, and love the idea of working anywhere in the world. Working remotely is a top priority, but we also don't want to feel alone. Let's explore some examples of companies that have addressed this issue: Gather Town, Miro, and Microsoft Teams. Collaborative components enable real-time collaboration by synchronizing participants' actions. The mouse pointers component utilizes a room concept to synchronize mouse positions. Channels and WebSockets are used for real-time data synchronization. CR-DTS is a conflict-free data-related type used to handle counter conflicts in collaborative environments.
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