Browserver: a node.js HTTP server, in your browser

http://browserver.org

by jedschmidt • 14 years ago

308 63 14 years ago

browserver.org

mislav• 14 years ago

Mind-bending.

quarterto4• 14 years ago

It's not just you! http://browserver.org looks down from here.

quarterto4• 14 years ago

And back.

quarterto4• 14 years ago

Kind of. Servers are 502ing.

debacle• 14 years ago

And they're down.

It was a good 15 minutes, though.

tinco• 14 years ago

I bet they closed their window >_>

mekwall• 14 years ago

Hacker News killed it with fire!

thefox• 14 years ago

Yes, still down.

sehrope• 14 years ago

Anyone know if browserver.org is self hosting (i.e. running on some guys desktop/laptop in a browser window)? Site is down at the moment and I'm wondering if this is why.

jedschmidt9• 14 years ago

Ha, tinco beat you to that joke. The server is the smallest instance that Joyent offers right now... hopefully it'll hang in there during the HN rush.

withjive2• 14 years ago

Would that happen to be one of the free http://no.de instances? Which if I recall correctly come with 128mb ram on their custom solaris servers... I always wondered what kind of load those small configurations using NodeJS while handling something non-trivial could do.

Could you share some traffic/load numbers from getting HN'ed?

jedschmidt9• 14 years ago

Hey all,

I put browserver together in my free time over the last week. It's still a bit of a toy, but I think it's useful to explore ideas around extending webhooks all the way to the browser, to simplify our increasingly complicated web architectures.

It's already late here in Tokyo, but I'll be up for a bit if anyone wants to chat/brainstorm about approaches like this (and also to make sure the server stays up).

quarterto4• 14 years ago

Simple question: how the fuck?

mcantelon2• 14 years ago

Basically a web browser reaches the Node HTTP server and gets assigned a throwaway hostname on the Node server. The browser and the server have a bidirectional connection (probably WebSocket via Socket.io or something). The throwaway hostname can be queried, via an HTTP API, and will, upon request, query the web browser through the bidirectional connection then will relay the results back.

shurane2• 14 years ago

Simple statement: stop being so cool.

On a related note, keep at it. I hope you go places.

And where/how did you get the idea?

Things like this make me wonder why I'm not having fun creating neat (and useful!) things.

madrobby• 14 years ago

I'm slightly disappointed that it's implemented in more than 140 bytes.

Keep on being awesome. :)

brettbergeron• 14 years ago

mind = blown

javajosh• 14 years ago

I had this idea, too, the killer application is actually demos and talks, I think. The speaker sets up their browser server, asks the audience to hit a URL, and then demonstrates in real time aspects of the system.

It's also a very neat way to bring WebKit Inspector to bear on server style code. Glad you did it! I presume that you have a wildcard subdomain at the DNS level and then some Node parsing magic to correctly proxy. Why subdomains though? Why not just a tag like browserver.com/29adfija02 ?

jedschmidt9• 14 years ago

I chose hosts over paths for disambiguation because I want the request passed to the proxy to be as close as possible to that passed to the browser.

wamatt• 14 years ago

This does sound sort of interesting, but after thinking about it I don't get why this is cool. Can someone explain a practical use case?

How is it different, in practice, from say running a Node.JS on localhost and using localtunnel?

HerraBRE• 14 years ago

Hey! I am doing something very similar with PageKite (http://pagekite.net/), although the server does not run in a browser.

I've decided to try to get authors of similar tools together on a mailing list to discuss whether we can agree on a common protocol so our clients/servers (connectors/relays, backends/frontends) can be interoperable. Join us: http://mailman.klaki.net/mailman/listinfo/revprotun

mgurlitz• 14 years ago

Github has a good readme if this site doesn't stay up: https://github.com/jed/browserver-node

jedschmidt9• 14 years ago

Good point. I'll get to githubbing the browserver.org site itself now.

jedschmidt9• 14 years ago

Okay, it's here:

https://github.com/jed/browserver.org

arunoda3• 14 years ago

Nice attempt. But your title is misleading.

You just listen for a URL and forward it to the browser with socket.io (Pusher, Pubnub are some commercial services for this)

If I can change some content in your webpage by just curling localhost, I can judge the title you put :)

shurane2• 14 years ago

So he still needs to host something that forwards information to the browser? Shucks.

poundy• 14 years ago

Yes, he needs to have a Node/Socket.io server somewhere.

jedschmidt9• 14 years ago

Indeed, this isn't entirely original, and I know services like this exist. To me, this is what PUSHER's API _should_ have been.

e12e• 14 years ago

So, it's not a new take on POW (plain old webserver): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/pow-plain-old... which apparently have been abandoned, and could use a fork (source at: http://davidkellogg.com/pow/ )?

Apparently there's a newer variation at:

  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/browser-server/

and of course there's Opera's Unity.

I do get that the idea is that it "just" uses javascript (the server appears to be down, so I'm actually guessing) -- but when such projects already exist, I kind of expected more...

arunoda3• 14 years ago

I thing they use some kind of native addon (I don't know how FF addon works) to do this.

Unfortunately Chrome's native client(NaCl) does not support TCP yet! So I think something like this impossible in chrome? Any ideas?

state2• 14 years ago

I think there's a ton of unrealized potential in this kind of thinking. Although people will say 'But that was done by X a year ago!' I see that as evidence that this is gaining momentum.

Now, what's the project that will fully take advantage of this kind of thing?

shaunxcode• 14 years ago

A lot of times it is about coming up with the right terminology and positioning of an idea for it to "take off". This is a really nice approach in that it utilizes concepts/a paradigm we are already comfortable with.

state2• 14 years ago

Yeah, agreed. Seems like one of the best things about this is that it positions a (potentially) big idea in a way which makes it easily understandable and fairly everyday.

Xurinos• 14 years ago

My hope is an answer to this problem that is so easy that my computer-phobic grandmother can do it: https://xkcd.com/949/

pbhjpbhj• 14 years ago

I think the Opera Unity approach is probably the best for this; perhaps such peernets will have their day.

I see the Unity approach being popularise via social networking (https://alicious.com/opera-about-to-change-the-world/) enabling users to retain control over their data and shop for suppliers to present a front-end to unify the data-streams of their associates.

arturadib2• 14 years ago

TL;DR: This is a proxy server that routes HTTP requests from a unique subdomain (e.g. http://m7rp3u2ntr9t3xr.browserver.org) to a browser that's visiting browserver.org. The JavaScript in the browser then handles the HTTP response. This is possible thanks to a persistent connection between the browser and browserver.org, via some "websocket-like" protocol.

The title "node.js HTTP server, in your browser" is because the HTTP handler in the client (browser) has a Node-like API, see:

https://github.com/jed/browserver-client#example

jedschmidt9• 14 years ago

Thank you for explaining this much better than I did!

fichtl80• 14 years ago

i get a gateway error

bilalhusain• 14 years ago

http://www.realtime.co/

ericz• 14 years ago

I find this title rather misleading. There is no node.js HTTP server in your browser. Meaning, you cannot do anything that is part of Node.js in the browser "server"

The browser is still running its original js engine with none of the Node goodies. It merely receives proxied requests, does some stuff to it, then sends it back to the proxy, which returns it to the client.

arturadib2• 14 years ago

The title might be a little too ambitious, but it is partially justified as the HTTP handler in the client (browser) has a Node-like API, see:

https://github.com/jed/browserver-client#example

jedschmidt9• 14 years ago

    It merely receives proxied requests, does some stuff to it, then sends it back to the proxy, which returns it to the client.

You just described the majority of the web servers that we web developers deal with. Sure, it's a proxy, but the fact that the machine responding is connected via WebSocket and not a local network doesn't make it any less of a server, in my opinion.

aba_sababa• 14 years ago

I don't really see why this is special. It's just a websocket connection that happens to show every request made to the server. Your browser is not a server, no matter which way you cut it.

andrewmunsell• 14 years ago

Sure it is. Yes, the web socket connection is passing through requests to the browser-server, but that browser-server is the one responding.

VikingCoder2• 14 years ago

...I'm looking forward to WebRTC, which should make this obsolete, right?

http://www.webrtc.org/

That said, this is cool!

jmspring• 14 years ago

Webrtc is about realtime communications. This is about exposing webhooks clientside.

VikingCoder2• 14 years ago

It also allows direct client-to-client communications.

alan_cx• 14 years ago

Ok so I can access it either, but:

Loading the app... If this message doesn't go away within 10 seconds, it means that the server crashed under heavy load. Please refresh mercilessly.

mcantelon2• 14 years ago

Weinre is a project that, if my understanding of it is correct, leverages the same basic idea. It's used to remotely debug mobile browser issues and also uses Node.

https://github.com/apache/incubator-cordova-weinre

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nL6xey13fE

sharps_xp• 14 years ago

I do not understand what is going on.

napolux• 14 years ago

We put a server in your browser. #inception

bestest• 14 years ago

What sorcery is this!

Kilimanjaro• 14 years ago

Just add a text area and let people share some html. Now that would be cool!

Change some HTML in that text area and refresh automatically in all listeners.

That would be an interesting toy to play for a while.

rip_kirby• 14 years ago

If you look at the favicon, there's two of them faviconception

shawndumas• 14 years ago

෴

Browserver: a node.js HTTP server, in your browser

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