syn

Generalized DNA for building real-time shared-state hApps on holochain

Syn: Etymology. From Ancient Greek συμ- (sum-), variant of συν- (sun-), from σύν (sún, “with, in company with, together with”).

Design

This project makes it easy to build collaborative apps in the distributed peer-to-peer context of Holochain. Syn uses Holochain's infrastructure for data integrity and peer-to-peer networking to store regular "commits" of the shared content's state, while coordinating batches of delta's that comprise those commits between nodes. The approach is generalized for many different use-cases, where the app-developer need only define:

1. A renderer for content state
2. A patch-grammar for applying deltas to content
3. A function to apply deltas to the content state
4. Any user interaction that should generate those deltas in the given grammar

For more details read the design documents, read the article, and check out the example app, SynText, in the /ui directory.

Prerequisites

• Build the Holochain tools
  • Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/holochain/holochain && cd ./holochain
  • Ensure correct version of rust tool-chain via nix: nix-shell
  • Install conductor binary & dna-util binary:

cargo install --path crates/holochain
cargo install --path crates/dna_util

• Make sure the path/to/holochain/.cargo/bin is in your PATH

Building the DNA

• Build the DNA (assumes you are still in the nix shell for correct rust/cargo versions from step above):

  • Clone this repo: git clone https://github.com/holochain/syn && cd ./syn
  • Assemble the DNA:

  make build

UI

We have provided a sample UI that implements collaborative text editing in a minimal editor. To run this UI in test mode you can install holochain-run-dna and spin up the conductor with two instances of the hApp:

holochain-run-dna -c run-dna-config.yaml -m

Then you can run the UI with:

cd ui
npm install
npm run dev

Now open two tabs in your browser pointing at http://localhost:5000. In the second tab, change the appPort to 8887 and the appId to syn1. Then click 'Connect'. Now you should be able to see both agents and start editing text on either tab and see it appear on the other.

Testing

make test

Unit testing

The make test-unit command runs all the unit tests for zomes in cargo.

dna tryorama testing

The make test-dna command packages/installs a fresh DNA and @holochain/tryorama tests it.

Flushing 💩

The make clean command gets rid of all compiled output.

License

Copyright (C) 2020-2021, Holochain Foundation

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the license provided in the LICENSE file (CAL-1.0). This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.