p2p-chat

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P2P Chat

What is it? P2P chat is a very simple example of leveraging the libp2p library from clojurescript.

Why? As a quick demonstration of how we can build P2P applications in Reagent / Re-Frame with a data-binding backed by a pub/sub model provided by the libp2p framework.

How does it work?

• Static files for the initial page, javascript and css are provided by the server.
• Next, each browser window connects to a bootstrapped peer list using libp2p and then subscribes to a "topic"
• Under the covers, libp2p uses web-sockets to connect the client to a set of distributed peers -- meanting it doesn't need a centralized server for communiations.
• Messages that are sent are published and each node "subscribes" to these updates.
• When the node gets an update, it populates its own local "app db" in re-frame with the relevant message
• The messages view then gets the update and shows it to each of the users.

NOTE libp2p is very experimental and subject to change. This project was meant as a toy exploration and not meant as a production solution.

Caveats

This solution isn't without caveats. Notably, the compiled code is several megabytes which is a substantial hit on first load. Additionally, the previous messages are not stored so when a client connects it only gets new updates.

Installation

1. Clone this repo
2. Run ./scripts/install.sh to obtain the libp2p library (warning: experimental)
3. Run lein cljsbuild once to build the javascript
4. Run lein garden once to build the css
5. Run lein repl and (-main) to start the server (only serves static files)