🌌 Solar Sail – Conditional DDP Client

Solar Sail is an extension of ddp-client, inspired by Fusion.
It allows you to conditionally start or stop the DDP (websocket) connection in your Meteor app, enabling lighter and more efficient client–server communication.

🚀 Why Solar Sail?

WebSockets are powerful but expensive:

• They consume persistent resources.
• Many apps don’t need live subscriptions everywhere.
• Sometimes you only want real-time data in specific areas of your app.

With Solar Sail, you can disable the websocket by default and still use Meteor.callAsync seamlessly over HTTPS. Then, when subscriptions are needed, you can start DDP on demand.

⚙️ How it Works

• By default, the websocket is disabled.
• All Meteor.call and Meteor.callAsync requests transparently fall back to HTTPS (no code changes required).
• When you need publications or reactive data, you simply engage DDP.
• You can disengage anytime to save resources.

Example:

import { DDP } from "meteor/ddp-client";

// Start websocket connection
DDP.engage();

// Stop websocket connection
DDP.disengage();

Subscriptions can be wrapped in an engage call, so you only connect when necessary. If all engaged handlers are stopped, the websocket connection is automatically closed.

import { SolarSail } from "meteor/ddp-client";

const handler = SolarSail.engage(() => {
  Meteor.subscribe("posts");
});

// Later, when you’re done:
handler.stop();

📦 Installation

# In your Meteor App
mkdir packages
cd packages
git clone https://github.com/pmogollons/solar-sail.git

⚠️ Not on Atmosphere: This package overrides ddp-client behavior, so it cant be published as a package. The long-term goal is to merge these improvements into Meteor core.

🔐 Authentication Support

When using HTTPS calls, Solar Sail still preserves authentication:

• The client automatically sends Accounts._storedLoginToken() with each request.
• On the server, this.userId works as expected in your methods.

✅ Works with accounts-password and compatible auth packages.

✨ Features Recap

• Websocket disabled by default
• Meteor.call & Meteor.callAsync work via HTTPS transparently
• Conditional DDP engagement (DDP.engage / DDP.disengage)
• SolarSail class for component-level connection management
• Automatic auth token forwarding
• No need to rewrite your methods

🙏 Acknowledgements

Solar Sail builds on the great work of Theodor Diaconu and the Fusion project.