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
    39 Shirts &#8211; Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

  • 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...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Flexbox Equal Height Columns

    Flexbox was supposed to be the pot of gold at the long, long rainbow of insufficient CSS layout techniques.  And the only disappointment I've experienced with flexbox is that browser vendors took so long to implement it.  I can't also claim to have pushed flexbox's limits, but...

  • By
    jQuery Chosen Plugin

    Without a doubt, my least favorite form element is the SELECT element.  The element is almost unstylable, looks different across platforms, has had inconsistent value access, and disaster that is the result of multiple=true is, well, a disaster.  Needless to say, whenever a developer goes...

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!