plane VS nats.ws

One reason I'm excited about this is that it appears to let you write arbitrary routing logic into a layer 7 proxy. This is something we had to build for https://plane.dev and it would have been nicer to use something like this, but we couldn't find anything like it at the time.

Of course, as a user, I would prefer as much as possible to be under MIT or Apache. See for instance https://plane.dev/ for a similar project which is MIT licensed and https://jamsocket.com/ for the commercial version.

From an earlier blog post[1], the system for synchronizing file/document state lives independently for their database. As I understand it, their database is for metadata rather than actual document content.

> It’s worth noting that we only use multiplayer for syncing changes to Figma documents. We also sync changes to a lot of other data (comments, users, teams, projects, etc.) but that is stored in Postgres, not our multiplayer system, and is synced with clients using a completely separate system that won’t be discussed in this article. Although these two systems are similar, they have separate implementations because of different tradeoffs around certain properties such as performance, offline availability, and security.

This post[2] goes into more detail on how they spin up backend processes to serve as the source of truth while documents are open (we took heavy inspiration from it when building https://plane.dev, which aims to be an open-source implementation of that architecture.)

[1] https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...

We have been happily using Depot for months now to build https://plane.dev. Prior to finding Depot, we basically gave up on building an M1 image from a GitHub action.

(btw, I always get suspicious when a Show HN post has a lot of praise in the comments, but I swear the Depot folks did not ask me to post anything and I only saw the post because I was checking HN)

Congrats on the launch!

We've been using Depot with Plane (https://plane.dev/). Prior to depot, I had to disable arm64 builds because they slowed the build down so much (30m+) on GitHub's machines. With Depot, we get arm64 and amd64 images in ~2m.

Even with NATS jetstream, NATS has a focus on service communication.

"It supports websockets" and "qos" does not mean it will work robustly with web apps if nobody uses NATS for that use case. See https://github.com/nats-io/nats.ws/issues/172 for an example issue. If NATS is not used for websockets in browsers, it will have a mine field of issues to fix. And what about all the other clients (mobile, mobile web)? Sure there may be a NATS client library for it, but it won't handle user connectivity issues, because again it's aimed at service communication where the network is great.

People are using NATS in kubernetes, not web browsers.