Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Vnc.js: how to build a JavaScript VNC Client (linkedin.com)
87 points by LiveTheDream on Dec 20, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 14 comments



I usually shrug off these JS demos but this is just getting ridiculous. The amount of stuff that people are creating with JS these days is amazing. Atwood's Law indeed.


I've seen a couple of JS VNC clients that use a canvas tag for the drawing surface before now, though they used some other language from the translation layer between the browser based client and the real server (this uses node to do that job, so still uses an extra layer but isn't using two completely different languages).

I've considered writing one that would operate on broken old browsers with no canvas support (in case I'm ever stuck with just IE6/7/8 in a place where I need to remote control one of my machines) which would take some extra work to be even moderately efficient, the server half having to translate changes into images to be delivered and positioned by the client half, and the client half dropping blocks as they become irrelevant (as their entire area has been replaced by later updates).

JS as a language is perfectly complete in terms of being capable of all this. The missing parts are not in the langauge but the supporting libraries (i.e. you can't just open a TCP connection client-side).


wow, yeah, that was my immediate thought too.

Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.


The fact that they developed this in 24 hours is ridiculous. I sat next to them when they did it and it was pretty incredible to see in action.


Yeah, this guy is insane.


It was actually a team of 4 people. Avik Das who is mentioned only briefly at the bottom of the article was crucial in finishing the project.


cool project. are you aware (or have considered) of similar projects for the RDP (rdesktop) protocol ?


Guacamole (http://guac-dev.org) has a ticket to implement RDP support, IIRC.


I have considered doing RDP in JS; however, it's a considerably more complex protocol and for that reason it wasn't really appropriate for a 24hr hackday..


This may then mean that a matching Javascript VNC server is not far away? I've been looking into non-flash Desktop sharing options and found this recently which is a peer-to-peer screensharing service over WebSockets: https://labs.ericsson.com/developer-community/blog/screen-sh...


This is one of the first apps I've seen using all these "hot" frameworks that would be worth something to a broad IT audience. Very cool.


Hasn't this already been done: https://github.com/kanaka/noVNC


Atwood's Law marches on.


I need me an intern like that. Nice work!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: