webtransport VS adama-lang

WebTransport is now enabled by default and will be going to release with 114. As the original Explainer notes, it enables multiple use-cases that are hard or impossible to handle without it, especially for Gaming and live streaming. It covers cases that are problematic for alternative mechanisms, such as WebSockets. Built on top of HTTP3 (HTTP2 support will be coming later). The current implementation in Firefox is passing 505 out of 565 Web-Platform Tests.

WebTransport is still an emerging technology. As of November 2022, WebTransport is a draft specification with W3C, and there’s always a chance that aspects related to how it works may change.

Sort of. The browser will re-use the connection if you have a bunch of resources in the HTML. When rendering it sees that it needs 2 images and 3 javascript files from the same server, so it pipelines all of those. But for requests initiated from javascript, you're going to get a new connection for each one unless you're using a library that implements the long-polling hack. SocketIO can use the long-polling hack as a fallback if websockets is not supported. HTTP/2 (formerly SPDY) gets part of the way to replacing websockets, but it's not a synchronous link. Only the client can send messages to the server and the server can only respond to those message (with websockets, either side can send messages once the connection is open). FWIW, less than 50% of websites use HTTP/2. HTTP/3's webtransport looks like it could replace websockets, but it also looks like it'll live along side websockets.

If it's streaming data like dashboard statistics the new WebTransport API might be a much better base: https://github.com/w3c/webtransport/blob/main/explainer.md

Are you guys looking into the Web Transport protocol for the future? Right now you have to tunnel the websocket connections over http2 and it will probably be the same for http3 afaik.

I know there is this work in progress (https://w3c.github.io/webtransport/) and websockets are probably fine for a long time but sooner or later (unless there is an update to websockets) it will probably be faster to just do normal http requests and listen on server sent events.

What are your thoughts for Liveview for the future? Will it forever stay on websockets or would you be open to change the underlying technology if / when new stuff becomes available?

The W3C draft is here: https://github.com/w3c/webtransport

It's taken nearly 10 years for QUIC to be refined and adopted in the wild and we're basically there. There's even a new browser API in the works called WebTransport.

tl;dr using WebRTC just for realtime client<->server data sucks, but WebTransport[1] is coming soon to serve that exact usecase with an easy API

WebRTC has data channels, which are currently the only way to achieve unreliable and unordered real-time communication (UDP-style) between the browser and other browsers or a server. This is pretty essential for any networked application where latency is critical, like voice and video and fast-paced multiplayer games.

As other commenters have noted, it's a royal pain in the ass to set up WebRTC if all you want is UDP-style communication between a server and browser, since you need to wrangle half a dozen other protocols in the process.

However! A new API, WebTransport[1], is actively being developed that will offer a WebSockets-like (read: super simple to set up) API for UDP-style communication. I am extremely excited about it and its potential for real-time browser-based multiplayer games (which I'm working on).

https://github.com/w3c/webtransport

I'm just a tryhard. However, I've been coding since a child out of a weird love/obsession. Nothing super successful in the public space, but I retired at 40 to spend time building my cathedral: https://www.adama-platform.com/

my history: https://www.adama-platform.com/2024/01/28/euler.html

I'm in the camp of f = ui(state), and the reason for this is the extreme of streaming games where UI = frame buffer. I'm inventing my own framework for radically simplifying traditional Web apps via RxHTML which works great for crud apps. However, games requires more insight into state machines and what-not.

In terms of the logic, I wrote an entire platform to simplify multi-player board games which I'm evolving to tackle various businesses. https://www.adama-platform.com/

For context, I was not raised religious at all and kind of thought a bunch of it was hokum.

But then I did a heroic dose, and I went to the church of engineering where I saw the entire construction of the machines use from the transistor all the way up to the platform I'm building.

My faith is more a faith that humanity is worth it, and I've come to see "The Lord" as an appropriate metaphor for the collective conciseness of several billion people living their lives.

At core, I'm rejecting nihilism as a valid way to live, and I'm writing an essay to outline the way.

In this, I also reject cynicism, and this is because it offers nothing.

The way forward is to embrace the responsibility that comes with great knowledge and to build an organization that helps push technology forward. This is why my platform is open source ( https://www.adama-platform.com/ ), and I'm working very hard to get my handful of clients in a good place.

I'll take the bait and provide evidence on why you should write a programming language.

First, it's technically very difficult, but you will gain deeper insight into the art of the craft. So, if you are a TC chaser or career minded person, then spending half a year writing a language will help you master the coding aspect of the game. I've started many languages since I started college, and each one was instructional. (I'm now 40 and an early retiree)

Second, it's fun.

Third, it may turn into something new. If some people don't write a new programming language, then we are stuck with what we have. This advice basically admits that the status quo is good enough.

The authors saying that the language, as a project, is a lifetime appointment? Well, this reveals everything. I believe if you want to do a programming language, then you must be willing to invest at least a decade or two.

So, here, I am at forty preparing to launch a SaaS around a language that I designed ( http://www.adama-lang.org/ ). The kicker, I believe, is that a project like this requires wandering the desert alone for quite a while.

I'm preparing to launch, and I just started to load test my shiny new production cluster. Low and behold, it sucks. Fortunately, I have a tremendous number of dashboards and isolated it to how I'm interacting with RDS. I've got my work cut out for me which I'll write about.

However, I have a potentially interesting business precisely because I evolved a language which solved a niche use-case. The number of problems that I have had to solve up to this point is not for the faint of heart. Life and reality are harsh mistress.

So, maybe, yes, you can save yourself some heartache by not writing a language. Perhaps, a better way to think or phase this is "Writing a programming language is a lonely affair that will most likely end in tragedy after a long death march".

I want to make games, but even some years ago I realized it was not a great path for a multitude of reason (many of which are in this article).

My path, and what I recommend, is do something hard and important which pays the bills at a premium. I did infrastructure work, and I was lucky to have a great decade long career allowing me to "retire early".

Now, I can work on a game at my pace building the tools that I see fit. I'm focused on board games because they have a timeless quality about them. I'm developing an entire SaaS platform and programming language to make the network goo beyond easy. http://www.adama-lang.org/

As I'm getting close to some kind of launch for the SaaS, my next thing is to build up my own web based IDE with a release-often ideology such that I can build a Roblox for online 2D board games. Honestly, I'm having a blast because I'm not suffering tools which are going to fade.

I like to call such a list a "wall of shame", and I have my own over here: http://jeffrey.io/wall-of-shame.html

What has helped me over the years is that I view tech as art, and so these projects are only market failures. Your growth as a technologist is manifest, and it's important to see side projects as a form of practice.

If you can move past the failure label and see everything as successful at something, then you feel a whole lot better. A discipline that I have had for decades now is to write a postmortem on why I believe a project is a failure because that crystalizes my learning.

My history helped me excel as a principal engineer which put me towards an early retirement where I can now focus on my ultimate side project: Adama ( http://www.adama-lang.org/ ) which I am turning into a new kind of PaaS thing.

Here is the crazy thing: I already know that I'm making several mistakes as I have no customers and no one asking me for anything. This is an exceptionally lonely way to start a project as the OP and others have noted, but I'm enjoying it well enough.

I'm working on http://www.adama-lang.org/ which started as a programming language for board games, and it is turning into a reactive privacy-focused data store for Jamstack.

I hope to launch in coming month an "Early Access" edition.

While I do intend to turn this into a business, I'm primarily focusing on small projects to amuse myself. I'm going to break every rule in the business with my LLC. The #1 company value is sleep.

I actually think this is onto something that I'm finding in a different way. Instead of a massive database, what if we had a key-value store mapping keys to tiny databases.

This is, to some degree, what I'm building over at http://www.adama-lang.org/ without a full SQL engine. Each document has tables, and the tables can be indexed. I have yet to find a usecase (in my domain) which requires joins. HOWEVER, I've had a ton of fun building it and I'm getting ready to start making games.

I do believe it would be amazing to have a key-logger service where a reducer like sqlite/adama could come into collapse the log into a single file.

The closest I see is from the Boki paper ( https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~zjia/boki-sosp21.pdf ) which was presented at SOSP21.

CRDT solve a part of your problem, and an important consideration is whether or not you want off-line editing. If you don't need off-line editing, then a WebSocket can do it.

I'm actually using my project to build a collaborative IDE (designer like Figma): http://www.adama-lang.org/

I'm going to be launching it as a SaaS soon so people can spin up a new back-end without managing an infrastructure.