hadrien-delaitre / nexus-uplink-client

Nexus Uplink Client (isomorphic).

Nexus Uplink Client

Nexus Uplink is an extension of REST semantics to enable real-time update push notifications from a server to the subscribing clients. It relies on simple HTTP request/responses and a secondary server-to-client push channel (implemented using the socket.io protocol).

Inspired by the Flux data-flow concepts of Facebook, data flows only one way, avoiding many of the pitfalls of asynchronous data management.

From the clients perspective, Uplink exposes an abstract store with subscribing (read-only), and an abstract action dispatcher (write-only). From the servers perspective, Uplink exposes an abstract store with publishing (write-only), and an abstract action handler (read-only).

Typical data flow:

user clicks a button -> dispatch 'do something' -[ action packet is sent over the wire ]-> handle 'do something' -> mutate store -> publish updates to subscribers clients -[ update packet is sent over the wire ]-> update subscribers objects

The client in this repo is isomorphic, ie. it can be require()-d in either a browser or in node and work with the same API. To implement the HTTP requests, it relies on browser-request in the browser and request on node. To implement the WebSocket client, it relies on socket.io-client in both the browser and node.