Syncing between users

[howardroark]

I was thinking a lot about how to use a tool like this effectively. Without being in person this is not really too effective, unless the other party understands the DOM. I would argue that most situations where tweaking is needed occur at unpredictable times. I'd be very curious if there was a simple way to allow two installations of this tool to sync their changes across the internet.

[borgstrom]

Without a server component there's no way to make this reliably happen over a wide area network, and not needing a server was one of the goals of this extension.

Do you think it would still be useful if you needed to be on the same network broadcast segment or you were required to setup and maintain a server component?

[howardroark]

It is useful, certainly in an office environment. I find that you end up displaying the output over google hangout, in remote situations. If you could just mirror a css change to a link hover colour, the other person could try it out real time.

Free surface could host a service on cloud at cost :P

[borgstrom]

So, I was thinking about this some more last night.

Maybe a server is the wrong way to go about it. What if we just leverage some of the free real-time communication services out there? We could use XMPP (Jabber) [since services like https://rows.io/ offer free XMPP services], create a room for the session and then sync actions back and forth.

By using XMPP we don't need to commit to any one service, we could ship a preconfigured list of some servers (ie. some from https://list.jabber.at/) and it means if you wanted to use a private server you could.

[howardroark]

Sounds good to me. Though, I just assumed that chrome plugins are restricted to http use.

[howardroark]

Maybe not... https://github.com/lloydwatkin/xmpp-chrome

[borgstrom]

I figured since (a) this isn't sensitive stuff and doesn't need to be encrypted and (b) is going to be simple user to user chat we can probably use something like this from within the devtools: https://github.com/strophe/strophejs

[howardroark]

This is great. This could be handy for phonegap.