orim

a collaborative chat and white board app built with Rust and Next.js

purpose

to experiment with implementing latency sensitive web applications with Rust and Web Canvas (via React).

project architecture

Orimboard is composed of 3 micro services:

1. The client (a next.js web app - used for rendering the UI, whiteboards, etc)
2. The API (a backend used to manage user state, facilitate new game server allocation, handle general business logic etc)
3. The (board)server - the real time engine used to facilitate collaborative white board editing and chat

When running in k8s - the board servers are treated as game servers, and are managed by Agones. The allocator service provided by the agones system is used to spin up new board servers and expose them for direct web socket connections.

getting started

1. Install Rust ( >= rustc 1.62.0 )
2. Install Node.js (>= v18.9.0)

## start up the api server
make run.api

## start up the board server
make run.server

## start up the client
make run.client

then open multiple web browsers @ http://localhost:3000

minikube quickstart

orim can run on Kubernetes locally with skaffold and minikube. This setup was tested on MacOS with following versions:

• minikube (>= 1.27.1)
• skaffold (>= 1.39.2)
• virtualbox (>= 6.1.38) Required for MacOS - for linux, you can safely skip this!

1. Start and configure minikube:

minikube delete # optional - deletes old minikube setup if exists.
minikube start
minikube addons enable ingress

Note: On Mac, we need to use minikube start --driver=virtualbox, because networking with the default docker driver can be quite challenging and we need to use multiple tunnels that need to run on background :/

2. Add IP address for orimboard.io into the /etc/hosts file (needs administrator access):

minikube ip # Returns the IP address of the minikube VM

# Add following entry to the /etc/hosts (replacing the IP address)
# 192.168.49.2 orimboard.io

3. Trigger skaffold dev for auto-rebuild on source code update:

skaffold dev

Skaffold will build the docker images using the docker host on minikube, and then deploy kubernetes resourcess. It will need some time for the deployment to stabilize.

4. Access http://orimboard.io from your favorite browser!

CTRL + C will stop skaffold, and cleanup and resources that was created at step #3. Then minikube stop will stop minikube, and could be restarted again with existing images in cache.

cloud environment setup

There are simple infra scripts in the .cloud directory of the project that can be run to provision a minimum viable compute environment for orimboard. Important - the following commands will provision billable infrastructure. Please consult your current account information with your perspective cloud provider.

Google Cloud

Ensure you have gcloud installed. Once setup, run the following:

# you must provide a value for $PROJECT_ID. region and clustername will fallback to defaults. please consult the script
make cluster.gke project=<your gcp project name>

Amazon Web Services (coming soon)

There is an example script in the .cloud/aws directory, but please be advised it is not tested.

known issues

1. shape rotation transforms do not sync across state yet

roadmap

1. support rotation transforms for shapes
2. setup basic user and auth system
3. panning and zoom