The ability to facilitate interconnectivity between multiple clients has always presented some rather interesting possibilities for both simple and complex Web Applications alike. More often than not, such interconnected applications would require complex server-side configurations (often proprietary in nature) in addition to numerous infrastructure considerations.
Peerbind, a new JavaScript API, remedies many of these complications by providing a very simple client-side API built on jQuery.
Peerbind is quite unique in that it provides an event binding API (on top of jQuery) that is shared amongst all connected clients of the same interest. Essentially this allows for binding something as common as a “click” event (or any event for that matter, including custom events) such that each active instance of the same application across the web will be notified of the event. As one might imagine, this allows for some rather compelling possibilities.
To demonstrate just how quickly and easily interconnectivity can be plugged into a web application using Peerbind (and the Peerbind public server), below is a simple example which displays a new item each time a new “peer” views the example page since loaded (hint: try opening a few instances, either in tabs or separate browsers).
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 | <!doctype html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8" /> <title>Simple Peerbind Example</title> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script> <script src="http://js.peerbind.com/jQuery.peerbind.js"></script> <script> var Peers = (function() { var added = function(e) { var timestamp = new Date(e.timeStamp); var visitor = e.srcPeer ? "New Visitor" : "You"; var item = "<li>" + visitor + " arrived on " + timestamp + "</li>"; $("#visitors").preppend(item); } var init = function() { var body = $(document.body); body.peerbind("peer", added); body.peertrigger("peer"); } return { init: init } }()); $(document).ready(Peers.init); </script> </head> <body> <ul id="visitors"></ul> </body> </html> |
Example (run)
Simple enough!
Of course, for most applications there are obvious security concerns which would need to be addressed as well as issues of scale and availability to take into consideration. That being said, if you haven’t checked out Peerbind yet and would like to quickly and easily add interconnectivity to your application or leverage it’s simplicity to prototype such features, it is certainly worth taking for a test drive.
{Sorry, Comments are currently Closed! }