Blogs

Preston So

April 08, 2020

Decentralized collaboration with Yjs and WebRTC: Potential applications for y-webrtc and how to get involved - part 5

What does the future of peer-to-peer real-time collaboration look like? Thanks to the spread of emerging web technologies like WebRTC, a protocol for communication between browsers on discrete systems, Yjs, an open-source real-time collaboration framework, and y-webrtc, the Yjs connector for WebRTC, a new range of use cases is entering the picture. While there are limitations, such as certain ceilings on the number of simultaneous collaborators, developments like y-webrtc are sure to reshape the landscape...

Hunter Lannon

April 06, 2020

Automating certificate management with ACME & Ansible (Automated Certificate Management Environment)

One of the annoying things about web hosting is managing certificates - nobody wants to spend time creating Certificate Signing Requests and checking emails for expiry notices. They expire, and domains change and become invalid, leaving a system administrator to communicate with a Certificate Authority (CA) to get new certificates and install them on the servers that need them. This manual process is tiring, boring, and has the potential to bring downtime to your services.

Preston So

April 01, 2020

Laravel at enterprise scale: Tackling complex business logic for millions of users with Laravel - part 1

In the PHP landscape, perhaps no framework has made as daring of decisions and as innovative of choices as Laravel, the PHP ecosystem that has long not been afforded the spotlight offered readily to CMS ecosystems like Drupal and WordPress and the lower-level Symfony. Laravel has displayed some unconventional directions, including adopting Vue.js as its JavaScript framework of choice and eschewing some of the common features available in other web frameworks. Fortunately, with the rich...

Preston So

March 30, 2020

Decentralized collaboration with Yjs and WebRTC: Handling many connections and applications for Yjs - part 4

Real-time collaboration is now more reality than ambition, but several obstacles remain, particularly in the form of peer-to-peer collaboration when many collaborators are involved. While Yjs, an open-source framework for real-time collaboration, and WebRTC, a new protocol for peer-to-peer communication now seeing wide browser support, permit editorial collaboration between peers in a graceful way, things get more complicated when many users enter the picture. Nonetheless, thanks to y-webrtc, the Yjs integration with WebRTC, we can...

Preston So

March 25, 2020

Tag1 Team Talk #012

Tackling Complex Business Logic with Laravel - Tag1 Team Talk #012

In this Tag1 Team Talks episode, Laslo Horváth (Senior Laravel Developer at Tag1) joins guests Fabian Franz (Senior Technical Architect and Performance Lead at Tag1), Michael Meyers (Managing Director at Tag1), and your host Preston So (Editor in Chief at Tag1 and Senior Director, Product Strategy at Oracle) for a deep dive into why Laravel should be your choice when building a mission-critical PHP architecture that encompasses a decoupled front end in JavaScript and multi-level...

Preston So

March 24, 2020

Collaborative editing in Gutenberg: The roadmap ahead for collaboration in Gutenberg and how to get involved - part 4

Content collaboration across multiple editors has long been table stakes in content management systems like Drupal and WordPress, but what about real-time, peer-to-peer, bonafide collaboration within the CMS context? There is a reason many of us CMS practitioners choose to use Google Docs for collaboration among editors. However, thanks to the open-source real-time collaboration framework Yjs, collaborative editing in the CMS context is now not only a possibility but also fast becoming a reality in...

Preston So

March 19, 2020

Decentralized collaboration with Yjs and WebRTC: How y-webrtc enables many connected peers - part 3

While collaboration between users has been a fixture of content management systems and web applications in general for many years, the prospect of true real-time, peer-to-peer collaboration remains relatively elusive despite the proliferation of new technologies over the past several years. Luckily, this may soon change thanks to the evolution of real-time collaboration frameworks like Yjs and the availability and level of browser support enjoyed by the new WebRTC protocol. With both Yjs and WebRTC...

Preston So

March 18, 2020

Claro at center stage:

What's ahead on Claro's roadmap and how you can get involved - part 4

Drupal has seen a range of administrative experiences over its history, starting with early Drupal mainstays like the Garland theme and Seven, perhaps the most recognizable iteration of Drupal's editorial experience in its history. Recently, another administration theme joined the pantheon of administration themes in Drupal core that have had an outsized influence on how users interact with Drupal not only for the first time but for countless times afterwards. The Claro administration theme is...

Preston So

March 17, 2020

Collaborative editing in Gutenberg: The unique challenges of implementing shared editing - part 3

One of the seemingly intractable difficulties in content management systems is the notion of supporting collaborative editing in a peer-to-peer fashion. Indeed, from an infrastructural standpoint, enabling shared editing in a context where server-side CMSs rule the day can be particularly challenging. All of this may soon change, however, with the combination of Yjs, an open-source real-time collaboration framework, and Gutenberg, the new editor for WordPress. With the potential future outlined by Yjs and collaborative...

Preston So

March 17, 2020

Decentralized collaboration with Yjs and WebRTC: Introducing signaling servers and y-webrtc - part 2

When it comes to the most exciting new developments in the field of web applications, perhaps no other phenomenon is gaining as much momentum as the prospect of true peer-to-peer collaborative editing. With its considerable obstacles and difficulties, collaborative editing has long been one of the less-explored realms of editorial workflows. Fortunately, thanks to new solutions like Yjs and better browser support for the WebRTC protocol, real-time collaboration is not only possible but also accessible...