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Mozilla Launches Real-Time Web Collaboration Framework
Mozilla's TogetherJS Javascript framework allows website visitors to see each other's mouse position on the screen, to follow each other's browsing, to edit web forms or watch videos together, and to chat via audio and WebRTC.
Credit: Mozilla.org
Mozilla recently launched TogetherJS, a JavaScript framework designed to simplify the process of adding real-time collaboration features to Web pages.
TogetherJS enables website visitors to see each other's mouse position on screen, to follow each other's browsing, to edit Web forms or watch videos together, and to chat via audio and WebRTC, note Mozilla's Ian Bicking and Robert Nyman in a blog post. TogetherJS also includes auto-follow, which enables a user to follow another user to a different Web page. Other features include participant windows, which provide information about other users in an active collaboration session, while profile settings allow avatar selection and color customization.
TogetherJS also includes revised notifications, which Mozilla says provide a clearer sense of what other participants are doing, and mobile device support. Mozilla says TogetherJS enables users to add collaboration features to any website with only a few lines of code. However, not all browsers can accommodate the framework, which requires Web Sockets support.
Other options for adding real-time collaboration to websites include the Google Drive Realtime API, which adds collaboration via JavaScript, and Firebase, a platform-as-a-service offering for collaborative applications.
From InformationWeek
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