2024-03-04

This is Luca Cappelletti's DBGI daily open-notebook.

Today is 2024.03.04

Setup WebSockets for the emi-monorepo to allow the frontend to receive updates from the backend

Since adding the code directly would be a lot of work to debug, I started by creating a prototype in the actix_yew_websockets repo. Once it works, I will integrate it into the emi-monorepo.

Managed to get several points of the integration of the WebSockets between the frontend and the backend working. I still do not understand severela key points of the concrete integration between frontend and backend, but I am making progress.
Contacted authors of ezsockets and yew-websocket who already worked on similar problems to ask for help. It is unclear whether their repos are still maintained, but I will try to get in touch with them.

One of the alternatives to Yew as a frontend framework called Leptos that seems to support WebSockets out of the box. Yew used to support Websockets, but for reasons they dropped support for it, I have no idea yet why. Swtching the repo at this point to Leptos would be a lot of work, but it could be a good alternative for the future. I still hope to get Yew to work for now.
Found this tutorial on using WebWorkers which could be useful for part of the work with WebSockets.
While in this tutorial they use a Yew Agent to handle the multi-subscribers issues to a websocket it seems that in the latest yew-agents they renames Agents to Workers and now handle the multi-subscriber issue out of the box with methods such as use_reactor_subscription. They renamed agents to workers because they use WebWorkers under the hood, and by calling them workers they make it clear that WebWorkers are used under the hood.
I have found this tutorial that makes use of the use_reactor_subscription method, which may be an important Rosetta stone to understand how to use WebWorkers & WebSockets with Yew.

Remove reqwasm as apparently they stopped developmemt and merged it into gloo-net.
Continue trying to get WebSockets to work with Yew.
Understand how to convert standard WebSocket messages, such as Text and Bytes, or more as listed from the actix web actors, into a standardized and more general pourpose enumeration that may be used with Yew Agents in our application. I hope to find some documentation that is less tautological than the one I found so far.