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
    How to Create a RetroPie on Raspberry Pi &#8211; Graphical Guide

    Today we get to play amazing games on our super powered game consoles, PCs, VR headsets, and even mobile devices.  While I enjoy playing new games these days, I do long for the retro gaming systems I had when I was a kid: the original Nintendo...

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Printing MooTools Accordion Items

    Sometimes we're presented with unforeseen problems when it comes to our JavaScript effects. In this case, I'm talking about printing jQuery and MooTools accordions. Each "closed" accordion content element has its height set to 0 which means it will be hidden when the...

  • By
    Multiple Backgrounds with CSS

    Anyone that's been in the web development industry for 5+ years knows that there are certain features that we should have had several years ago. One of those features is the HTML5 placeholder; we used JavaScript shims for a decade before placeholder came...

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!