Context

When I browse Reddit or another similar website there are many images that I want to share with someone. The process currently looks like this:

• Copy URL to clipboard
• Paste URL to friend
• Friend clicks URL
• Friend notices funny image
• Repeat above

Problem

This process works great when I’m only sharing 1 or 2 images, but sometimes me and my buddy spend a good 10 minutes sending random images to each other and this process becomes inefficient.

I’m thinking about building a web app that will dynamically load any type of content for both users.

The use case is the following:

• User 1 sends User 2 a link to the web app
• User 1 can pass a link to the web app, which will load link automatically for User 2
• Both users can automatically load content for each other

How to build this?

Solution

Usually clients use AJAX to poll a server for status updates, but in this case, it would make sense for either the clients communicate directly or the server to push to clients updates.

I have looked into browser to browser communication platforms like WebRTC, but I don’t feel that is at a usable state for this type of project.

For the server to push updates to the client, the options are some sort of web sockets. That leaves two major tools: socket.io and SockJS.

After doing a little bit of Googling it seems the common consensus is that SockJS is better than socket.io.

Conclusion

This seems to be a pretty easy project to do, it seems like with SockJS lots of the hard implementation details are taken care of. I want to cover the concepts of SockJS in another blog post though!