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TogetherJS Is Mozilla’s Real-Time Collaboration Tool That Works Anywhere On The Web

Real-time collaboration is an important part of the modern Web. In fact, you could argue that it’s the most important aspect of any modern Web app – just look at how much emphasis Google D...
TogetherJS Is Mozilla’s Real-Time Collaboration Tool That Works Anywhere On The Web
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  • Real-time collaboration is an important part of the modern Web. In fact, you could argue that it’s the most important aspect of any modern Web app – just look at how much emphasis Google Docs puts on working together. Unfortunately, such collaboration is only currently possible in Web apps built specifically with that in mind, but Mozilla wants to change all that.

    Mozilla Labs announced today that it’s releasing TogetherJS to the world. It’s an HTML5-based collaboration tool that adds the same kind of tools that you see in Google Drive to any Web app or site. While it may be focused on collaboration, TogetherJS is also a communications tool that enables text and audio chat between two or more people via WebRTC.

    Here’s a full list of the features currently enabled by TogetherJS:

  • See the other person’s cursor and clicks
  • See scroll position
  • Watch the pages a person visits on a page
  • Text chat
  • Audio chat using WebRTC
  • Form field synchronization (text fields, checkboxes, etc)
  • Play/pause/track videos in sync
  • Continue sessions across multiple pages on a site
  • And here’s a video of it in action:

    You may have noticed by now that TogetherJS is a carbon copy of TowTruck – a real-time collaboration tool that was released by Mozilla Labs in alpha back in April. As it turns out, Mozilla changed the name to TogetherJS last month, but said that the underlying technology remained the same. The reason for the name change was solely due to Mozilla realizing that TowTruck quickly outgrew its original ambition and it needed a new name to reflect this reality.

    If you want to know more about TogetherJS, check out Mozilla’s excellent technology overview. If you want to contribute, you can find its GitHub page here.

    [Image: Mozilla Webmakers/YouTube]

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