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    Learn Yjs Interactively

    (learn.yjs.dev)
    296 points paulgb | 12 comments | 16 Jan 25 22:13 UTC | HN request time: 1.068s | source | bottom
    1. jakelazaroff ◴[16 Jan 25 22:15 UTC] No.42731601[source]▶
    Hey HN! I'm the developer at Jamsocket who made this. In case you're not familiar with Yjs, it's a CRDT library for building collaborative and local-first apps.

    The thing is, if you're not used to working with distributed state there's definitely a learning curve. Even simple things like incrementing a counter — the "hello world" of JavaScript framework demos — get tricky when dealing with multiple clients. Worse, a lot of tutorials are just like "install this library and text editor integration and boom you have an app", which doesn't give you a good mental model for what's actually happening.

    So we made Learn Yjs! It's an interactive Yjs tutorial. I wanted it to be really intuitive for people just getting their feet wet with local-first development, so there are lots of explorable demos and coding exercises. The idea is to use interactive examples to build an understanding from the ground up.

    Hope you like it :)

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    2. nhatcher ◴[17 Jan 25 00:23 UTC] No.42732669[source]▶
    Woah! Beautifully done! I wonder if I will finally understand CRDT with this. Will go through it over the weekend.

    Congratulations!

    3. santa_boy ◴[17 Jan 25 02:40 UTC] No.42733533[source]▶
    I am just looking at this but quick question. Is there an example for building a local-first app? Also, I working with plain vanilla HTML & JS and Alpine. Can this be used in my apps?
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    4. ◴[17 Jan 25 05:24 UTC] No.42734366[source]▶
    5. paulgb ◴[17 Jan 25 05:59 UTC] No.42734517[source]▶
    Y-sweet (which this is built with) allows you to make a Yjs app local-first by passing “offlineSupport” to the provider when constructing.

    There’s a demo of this here: https://demos.y-sweet.dev/color-grid

    The source for that demo is here: https://github.com/jamsocket/y-sweet/blob/5fa6941cf5568f4a3f...

    That demo uses react, but there is a vanilla js version of the same demo here: https://github.com/jamsocket/y-sweet/tree/main/examples/vani...

    (The vanilla js version is not local first, but it would just be a matter of passing the same offlineSupport flag to make it so.)

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    6. santa_boy ◴[17 Jan 25 06:17 UTC] No.42734608{3}[source]▶
    Thank you. This is the direction I needed. Will try out
    7. adeptima ◴[17 Jan 25 07:01 UTC] No.42734849[source]▶
    Thank you. Keep going. Very good topic to expand
    8. KaiMagnus ◴[17 Jan 25 07:22 UTC] No.42734940[source]▶
    > "install this library and text editor integration and boom you have an app", which doesn't give you a good mental model for what's actually happening.

    I was interested in working with CRDTs and collaboration in general for a while now and this has been the biggest issue whenever I tried to get into it. Websockets also seem a bit harder to find (free) hosting for.

    Btw, your other tutorials on CRDTs were also a great help.

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    9. Imustaskforhelp ◴[17 Jan 25 16:10 UTC] No.42739361[source]▶
    Cloudflare workers can host soketi which is websocket.
    10. jakelazaroff ◴[17 Jan 25 16:17 UTC] No.42739499[source]▶
    Thank you!

    As far as websocket hosting, there are a few services out there. We offer a pretty generous free tier for Y-Sweet [1] with 10GB of storage. There's also PartyKit and Liveblocks, though I'm not sure what their pricing is like.

    [1] https://jamsocket.com/y-sweet#y-sweet-pricing

    11. steve_adams_86 ◴[17 Jan 25 18:41 UTC] No.42741792{3}[source]▶
    I just noticed that if you install the example service after setting up an account, it installs a version of @y-sweet/react which doesn't offer the offlineSupport prop.

    The version specified is ^0.5.1. After switching to 0.7.1 as the repo you linked uses, all is well. Probably not a big deal for most newcomers, but it might be worth updating dependencies in the example service.

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    12. paulgb ◴[17 Jan 25 18:42 UTC] No.42741801{4}[source]▶
    Thanks Steve, good catch!