Show HN: DriftDB – an open source WebSocket backend for real-time apps

367 points

3 years ago

Hey HN! I’ve written a bunch of WebSocket servers over the years to do simple things like state synchronization, WebRTC signaling, and notifying a client when a backend job was run. I realized that if I had a simple way to create a private, temporary, mini-redis that the client could talk to directly, it would save a lot of time. So we created DriftDB.

In addition to the open source server that you can run yourself, we also provide https://jamsocket.live where you can use an instance we host on Cloudflare’s edge (~13ms round trip latency from my home in NY).

You may have seen my blog post a couple months back, “You might not need a CRDT”[1]. Some of those ideas (especially the emphasis on state machine synchronization) are implemented in DriftDB.

Here’s an IRL talk I gave on DriftDB last week at Browsertech SF[2] and a 4-minute tutorial of building a cross-client synchronized slider component in React[3]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33865672

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPRv3MImcqM

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktb6HUZlyJs

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