

Internet Explorer 6 as a chat server with Bridge RPC - sthatipamala
https://www.getbridge.com/blog/ie6chatserver

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possibilistic
Forgive me for not being very literate with this type of development, but why
would you use Bridge over something like ZeroMQ? (I don't work much in this
area, so sorry for my naïveté.)

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sthatipamala
ZeroMQ is one layer down the stack. It is higher-level than TCP but it's
basically a transport.

Bridge comes with RPC and automatic routing. It allows you to expose services
simply by instantiating native objects and making method calls. (Like an
easier version of Apache Thrift: <http://thrift.apache.org/>)

It also takes care of the socket management and routing for you, so there is
no host/port configuration to talk to any endpoint in the system. You can
simply address things by a human-readable name like "photo-processor" or
"search-server".

~~~
possibilistic
Thanks for making this clear to me! :)

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btipling
That's cute, but the _server_ is actually at getbridge.com, it's not IE6. A
browser cannot serve requests. The IE6 client is communicating via
getbridge.com, from where the actual connections are being served. There's
just some centralized application code in that particular IE6 browser that is
controlling the channel logic.

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dshankar
This is pointed out explicitly in the section titled "Is this magic?"

We never claim "no server." Our goal was to ask the question, what's possible
if you can run computational logic in the browser and rely on a physical
server purely for message routing (Bridge).

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ciparis
Why the hell would you subject your developers to looking at anything in IE6?
Are they masochists by nature?

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skrebbel
The JavaScript in IE6 isn't too horrible. It's mostly the layout and rendering
that it sucks at. By choosing IE6, they could give you the scares without
really having a lot of trouble.

I bet they made it with Chrome (or the likes), copied it into IE6, fixed a bug
or two (without even bothering about cross-browser compat), and done. 30
minutes. Writing the article costs more time.

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rgarcia
While this is awesome, I think declaring the "death of client-server" is kind
of naive. For anything that handles sensitive information (e.g. the auth()
service here), it'd be mayhem to have all clients also be servers.

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dshankar
Our interpretation is that the concept of a client and a server is no longer
relevant. Clients are just machines that are over the network that you don't
trust. An iPhone is more powerful than servers from 10 years ago. It's a (bad)
brief explanation but do you see my point?

Perhaps the only relevant concept now is publishers and subscribers rather
than clients and servers?

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rgarcia
Yeah, that makes sense, and I agree. You make a finer point than the third
bullet point in the post :)

Btw, love Bridge--using it to do some slick "client-side" form validation
across browser and iOS clients. Keep up the good work!

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jtchang
It works in IE6?!

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sukuriant
It. _is_ IE6.

