Using TogetherJS

By  on  

TogetherJS

Last week I highlighted five awesome Mozilla technologies that most people have never heard of.  Before the Mozilla Summit in Santa Clara, even I (a Mozilla employee)  had not heard of a few of them.  One of the projects I was most impressed by was TogetherJS, a project created to allow for simple collaborative development between any number of users.  My favorite attribute of TogetherJS is that it's so incredibly easy to implement.  Let me show you how!

The HTML

Implementing TogetherJS only requires a script tag and an opt-in button to initiate collaboration:

<script src="https://togetherjs.com/togetherjs-min.js"></script>

<button onclick="TogetherJS(this); return false;">Collaborate!</button>

The TogetherJS(this) call initiates the library, displaying an opt-in dialog, and then users can see where other users place their cursor, click, change form fields, and modify page contents. The updates can be anonymous (yay privacy!) and effective!

What an incredible utility -- never has instant collaboration been so easy!  TogetherJS is a another example of how Mozilla is fighting to make not just development easier, but collaboration of all kinds easier.  The epic development sandbox, JSFiddle, has implemented TogetherJS to allow for easily collaboration and code experimentation.  Leave it to Mozilla to create an epic collaboration tool that's easy to implement!

Recent Features

  • By
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

  • By
    Write Simple, Elegant and Maintainable Media Queries with Sass

    I spent a few months experimenting with different approaches for writing simple, elegant and maintainable media queries with Sass. Each solution had something that I really liked, but I couldn't find one that covered everything I needed to do, so I ventured into creating my...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    JavaScript Speech Recognition

    Speech recognition software is becoming more and more important; it started (for me) with Siri on iOS, then Amazon's Echo, then my new Apple TV, and so on.  Speech recognition is so useful for not just us tech superstars but for people who either want to work "hands...

  • By
    Send Email Notifications for Broken Images Using jQuery AJAX

    It's usually best to repair broken image paths as soon as possible because they can damage a website's credibility. And even worse is having a user tell you about it. Using jQuery and PHP, you can have your page automatically notify you of broken...

Discussion

  1. Does Jsfiddle activate it by keyboard shortcut as well as by link? Numerous times its rather annoyingly popped up while I’ve been speed typing or quickly hitting crtl shortcuts. On an old dog of a machines like mine its actual pretty laggy.

  2. Nils

    that’s just like towtruck, is it?

  3. Good
    this was a good post! Handbag Coach Online http://kpmpacks.in/handbag-coach-online.html

  4. Hi David,

    You might be interested in trying out surfly.com: it is similar to togetherjs but requires no modifications to the website and works with signed in sessions.

  5. zip

    To Denis.

    But your version doesn’t take parallel interaction, only view!

  6. Rahul

    can we implement drag and drop functionality in togetherjs application

  7. Jack

    Hi David,
    This example does not seem to work. Is the Mozilla TogetherJS still active?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!