I'm more than a little worried about the following all being `Coming Soon`:
- Cursors & carets
- Two way sync to your DB
- Video presence & calls
- both the Group and BinaryCoStreams
It is these key topics of live reloading/updating data that make or break an app. In my opinion, if you haven't concretely solved these problems, you haven't really built a viable state framework for 2024.
I really like the patterns they've implemented though, looks a lot like the same framework I just built on top of MobX, websockets, and React for a recent project. They're headed in the right direction, but I'm not sure they realize how much more work they have to go before this is fully fleshed out.
Seems like you have lots of real world mobx experience.
Have you ever read this article, basically saying that every front end state (including mobx) basically ends up being a worse version of a standard database?
https://sqlsync.dev/posts/stop-building-databases/
I ended up finding that article after running into lots of the challenges with mobx State tree. I ended up trying to use watermelondb, a sqlite wrapped for react native, but gave up entirely on offline due to bugs and project abandonment
It is already persisting and syncing data (fully encrypted) between the cloud and other users. You can think of Jazz as a distributed database itself.
The coming-soon badges are about interop with traditional systems and higher level features we will add later.
The fundamentals are solved and you can build full multiplayer, local-first apps with it.
Does that make sense?
I love building with Jazz. It's so refreshing to build apps without thinking about backends.
The number one thing I'm looking forward to is React Native support. Having local data that syncs is essential for many mobile apps, but there are no easy solutions yet. (Besides iCloud, which is limited to iOS/macOS)
With Jazz, I can see a future where building syncing, cross-platform apps becomes effortless.
Mild nit: your website hijacked the back button, I had to spam click back like 30 times to get back to this hacker news comment thread
>I had to spam click back like 30 times to get back to this hacker news comment thread
Click-and-holding or right-clicking the back button will give you a list of last N URLs in your tab history. This page only generates one auto-redirect, so the HN URL will show up.
Thank you for this. Many years of browser usage and I never knew this.
Just tried this in Arc and Firefox...I never knew.
Founder here - do you mean the chat example? Or just the homepage itself?
On Firefox 131.0 I clicked through the tabs with the demo code, then pressed my mouse's "back" button and it didn't work. So I manually clicked the back button and it directed me back to this page.
Then I opened it again and clicked the back button and it didn't work again.
I couldn't replicate this in Firefox 131 under W11.
homepage itself, firefox on ubuntu
Are the history entries all just the same URL? Thanks for reporting
Yes (encountered same issue on ff macos after clicking on example tabs)
same for me safari on macos15
Tip for next time this happens: hold down the back button for a menu of your history. It can help get where you want faster. Although not sure it helps too much if you literally had to click 30 times
That or right click.
I wonder if they tested this at all. What a poor showing.
Edit: This IS being used to build a product, see reply below
One thing I always find weird about these sorts of projects is I get the feeling this is a framework built up from scratch. I've always had really bad luck doing that. Extracting and refining something from a running application always feels like you catch the cases that actually matter.
It's neat that it's quick to start, but I think that's mostly because the framework has only been evaluated by making tiny toy examples. Staying reaaaaally close to the framework code is sort of like painting with your nose against the canvas. At the scale of features you want to fit in:
- live sync
- authorization
- video chat
- an open connection to your DB, presumably meaning this is your main data fetching API
It's sensibly licensed though (MIT), and honestly, skimming the source, seems clean to work with! I hope people using this contribute back to it, to get over that starter-project hurdle.
Jazz is built specifically for a work-in-progress, but full app (essentially a Notion clone, TBA) and all the design choices are driven by that.
Completely agree that this is the only way to create frameworks.
Edit: also other people are building full apps with it too which I’ll showcase soon. https://learn-anything.xyz/ is one example, https://invoiceradar.com/ is another.
Oh neat! I stand corrected then! That's really cool!
Definitely get that showcase up, I think it just helps to confirm this isn't one of those stealth-mode "solves everything" dev tools that disappears along with it's VC funding.
Over the past few years, I've worked on and used a bunch of different frameworks to try to solve for distributed state. Jazz feels like it has the right "shape" - the right primitives to quickly build an app with magical powers like offline, real-time collab, etc.
If you can push the distributed state problem below the framework level, it becomes dead simple to build apps, which feels great.
Thanks for the kind words, Jess!
After a cursory review of the docs, it conceptually reminds me of iroh: https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh.
Founder here - thanks for posting this! It’s getting late where I am so everyone who has questions please don’t be shy to ask, will elaborate in detail tomorrow!
> Jazz Mesh is currently free — and it's set up as the default sync & storage peer in Jazz
How difficult is it to run my own backend?
Edit:
> Completely DIY Mesh.
> Build your own network of sync and storage nodes. Handle networking, security and backups yourself.
> Costs:
> N × instance cost for your sync nodes.
> Very high self-hosted egress costs.
> High self-hosted storage costs.
Compared to Mesh Pro at $79 for 30,000 sync-minutes (“Sync-minutes are counted on a per-connected-device, per-minute basis.”) per month… I bet the cost of self-hosted storage and egress is very low, actually, of course assuming you have the competence and time to DIY it.
npx jazz-run sync
Either locally or on your server.
And then point the app to that!
Edit: re pricing
Super preliminary, curious to hear everyone’s thoughts
Awesome project!
fyi on latest Chrome the navigation items blog, releases, roadmap are aligned top/start instead of center for me
very cool! I was there for maybe 2 minutes before HN took the system down :D
Investigating why it’s breaking, was there a lot of people in that room?
when it broke there were 3-4 people in it
Not very cool if it breaks under hardly any load.
You'd think they'd test their tech demos on more than a handful of people before launching. This doesn't give much confidence at all in their product.
Where are the information about the company? I cannot find an About Us, where they are based, etc?
Founder here - we’re working on that page, so far there’s just info on me on https://gcmp.io/team
But I was able to hire a couple really good first people recently! We’re based all over Europe.
Let me know what else you’d like to know!
Neat work! Can the author provide any ideas around:
1) Differences from fire-svelte for core functionality?
2) For the beyond core aspects, like Group-WebRTC (great innovation btw), how will things like TURN/PEER servers work to manage the WebRTC connections?
What exactly does fire-svelte do? For me it looked like a frontend framework but without synced or persisted state?
Nice, but react.
This is JavaScript only from what I can tell.
It's TypeScript... but maybe TypeScript only?
You missed an opportunity to call the free tier of your mesh service "free jazz".
Great idea!