How does whatsappweb deliver updates? - reactjs

I'm wondering how does whatsappweb deliver updates?
Do you ever notice a left green card appearing sometimes and asking you to click in a link to refresh page and run the new whatsappweb fresh code updated.
I'm almost sure they use webpack, service workers etc.
Chances are that you already had cache problems using webpack where even refreshing page it remains cached.
So how does whatsappweb solved this issue with a single refresh link?

They use a service worker, if the service worker gets updated, they trigger something in the react app, is easy to do it.
serviceWorker.register({ onUpdate: () => {console.log('new service worker')}});
just dispatch something instead of the console.log

Webpack is a building tool and isn't involved anywhere on a live site. While it offers Hot Module Reload for the development server you will not get it on the production version.
Unlike traditional desktop applications, delivering updates for websites is as straightforward as updating the files on your server (and invalidating any browser caches). You don't need to notify the user to download something, a simple refresh will get the new pages.
If you really want instantaneous updates (without waiting for the user to refresh the page) you can create some sort of WebSocket communication which when a message is received triggers a browser refresh. Nothing special and no deployment mechanisms involved.

Related

React app hosted by Netlify doesn't update unless F5 or reload

I'm a little surprised there is nothing out there about this that I have found. But just like the title says, I have a React SPA deployed to Netlify. It goes live without error. The only issue is, if the end user has been to the site before, they have to refresh the page to see any changes I have pushed out.
Is there something I need to add to the index file perhaps?
The browser caches the compiled js bundle.
You can read more here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cache-Control
One of your options would be to disable it, or set cache expiration to a lower value during the intense development and increase it if/when you deploy less often.
Another option could be to implement some kind of API method to check if newer version has been deployed and trigger a page refresh. (Please be careful not to discard users work, like data filled in forms, during a refresh)
Each have pros and cons.

ExtJS6: Partial App load for special request that always opens in a new window

We have a ExtJS7 app, that for special requests like reset password, that always opens a new tab via email reset link, get loaded in full. We would like to load only few pages that are needed to load for these kind of request
Is there a way in ExtJS that would only load a particular page and its dependencies
I have not seen tutorials on this subject in official documentation. Myself did the following - just created another app (or bundle) for logging. The backend is responsible for the logic of what to display (loginapp or mainapp) - in the absence of a session, the user receives the app login
Absolutely. You can make another app - each app is a page, and will have its own packaged dependencies.
That's the easiest approach. A more complicated approach is to break your application into several ExtJS packages. You can then configure the app.json to exclude all of the packages from the micro loader. You then need to load these packages dynamically, presumably after logging in.
Doing this, though, is extremely complicated, and almost certainly not worth doing.

Force Reload of AngularJS Pages

Is there any way with AngularJS to force a page to refresh after it has been changed. What I mean by this is that I have multiple users actively working in the app but a change is required to the controller.js file. At this point the only way I'm aware of is for them to manually push refresh on the browser. Is there any code that I can use to make it "actively" watch that file for changes and reload when necessary without the users having to manually push refresh?
This isn't really an angular problem. You can do polling on the client side with setInterval, hitting the file on the server to trigger a refresh on the client.
If you're looking for something to speed up development, then you're probably looking for hot module loading. The solution depends on what version of angular and build tool you're using (e.g. grunt/webpack/npm).
Check out this article for angular 2, but you can find similar solutions for angular 1:
http://blog.mgechev.com/2015/10/26/angular2-hot-loader-hot-loading-tooling/
But if you just want to force a page refresh from the client side, you would just call: $window.location.reload()

How to update a current page without refreshing it using node?

Im trying to create a web page similar to Facebook Home page using MEAN stack.
So when you add a new post, the page adds the post without refreshing it. And if I delete the post the page will delete the post without refreshing the page also.
Should I be using Ajax, Socket io, or etc? not really sure what is the best practice to implement that.
if you have a working example, that will be great.
Thanks
What are you asking for is a situation called server-push where you want the server to be able to notify an open web page about some sort of change so Javascript in the page can then update the display of the page without reloading it.
The usual way in modern browsers to implement server-push is to make a webSocket connection from the browser web page back to the server. This webSocket connection will then stay open and the server is free to send messages to the web page at any time (announcing new posts or deleted posts) and the Javascript in the webpage can then update the display accordingly.
A common implementation of webSocket that works in node.js and all browsers is the socket.io library that you mentioned. It adds some useful features on top of webSockets such as auto-reconnect and a simple message-passing system.
The other less-efficient way to do this is for each web page to send a recurring ajax call (say every minute) to the server asking what has changed recently. But, since this results in a lot of ajax calls where nothing has changed, this can end up being significantly less efficient for both server load and bandwidth usage.
SocketStream is a good solution:
https://github.com/socketstream/socketstream
There are many examples. It will take some time.

How to handle expired files without refreshing the browser when using Single Page Application (SPA)?

I have done a full Single Page Application (SPA) application using Angularjs.
So far so good.
As anyone knows, all javascript files are loaded in the first time access. Or, some file are loaded in lazy mode style when needed.
So far so good...
The situation is: the server updates all files (html partials, javascripts, css's) and the client remain with a lot of files out-dated.
This would be simply solved refreshing the browser, hit F5 key, control+f5, or refresh button in the browser. But this concept does not exists when working with SPA.
I'm not sure how to solve this problem.
I could detect somehow (doing a ping maybe) and just to re-load that specific file. With document.write strategy. But now rises another problem, I have a single javascript file with all javascript minified.
I could try to force a full reload in the browser or force to re-login (and reload because login are SPA part).
But reloading is an ugly solution, imagine the client lose all data in the form because he was unlucky the server have just updated. And worse, I must now create some "auto-save" feature just because of this.
I'm not sure how to handle this, if possible, doing in "angular way".
I wonder how google gmail handles this because I stay logged for many many hours without logging of.
As others have already suggested, keep the logged user on the old version of your webapp.
Not only what you ask is difficult to do in Angular, but it can also lead to a bad user experience and surprising behaviour, since there may not be a mapping between what the user is doing with the old version and what the new version provides. Views may be removed, renamed, split or merged. The behaviour of the same view may have changed, and doing so without notice for the user may cause mistakes.
You made an example with Gmail, but may have noticed that changes to the UI always happen after you logout, never while you're using it.
First of all, if your app is an intranet website used during office time, just update it while nobody is using it. This is a much simpler solution.
Otherwise, if you need to provide 24/24 availability, my suggestion is:
When you deploy the new version of your SPA, keep the old version in parallel with the new version, keep the current users on the old version, and log new users to the new version. This can be made in a number of ways depending on your setup, but it's not difficult to do.
Keep the old version around until you're confident that nobody is still using it or you're pretty sure that the new version is ok and you don't need to rollback to the old version.
The backend services should be backward-compatible with the old version of the frontend. If that's not possible you should keep multiple version of the backend services too.
As the rest of the guys said a solution can be to versioning your files. So every time that your browser check those files out the browser notice that the files are different to the ones that are in the server so the browser cache the new files.
I suggest to use some build tool like gulp, grunt or webpack, the last one is becoming more popular.
By the moment I use gulp for my projects. I´m moving to webpack though.
if you are interested in gulp you can have a look to gulp-rev and gulp-rev-replace plugins.
What do they do?
let´s say that we have the next file in your project app.js what you get after apply gulp-rev to your project is something like app-4j8888dp.js then your html file where the app.js is injected is still pointing to app.js so you need to replace it. To do that you can use gulp-rev-replace plugin.
eg. gulp task where
var gulp = require('gulp');
var rev = require('gulp-rev');
var revReplace = require('gulp-rev-replace');
var useref = require('gulp-useref');
var filter = require('gulp-filter');
var uglify = require('gulp-uglify');
var csso = require('gulp-csso');
gulp.task("index", function() {
var jsFilter = filter("**/*.js", { restore: true });
var cssFilter = filter("**/*.css", { restore: true });
var indexHtmlFilter = filter(['**/*', '!**/index.html'], { restore: true });
return gulp.src("src/index.html")
.pipe(useref()) // Concatenate with gulp-useref
.pipe(jsFilter)
.pipe(uglify()) // Minify any javascript sources
.pipe(jsFilter.restore)
.pipe(cssFilter)
.pipe(csso()) // Minify any CSS sources
.pipe(cssFilter.restore)
.pipe(indexHtmlFilter)
.pipe(rev()) // Rename the concatenated files (but not index.html)
.pipe(indexHtmlFilter.restore)
.pipe(revReplace()) // Substitute in new filenames
.pipe(gulp.dest('public'));
});
if you want to know further details see the links bellow.
https://github.com/sindresorhus/gulp-rev
https://github.com/jamesknelson/gulp-rev-replace
A single page application is that, a single stack that controls the client logic of your application. Thus, any navigation done through the application should be handled by your client, and not by the server. The goal is to have a one single "fat" HTTP request that loads everything you need, and then perform small HTTP requests.
That's why you can only have one ng-app in your apps. You are not suppose to have multiple and just load the modules you need (although the AngularJS team wants to move that way). In all cases, you should serve the same minified file and handle everything from your application.
It seems to me that you are more worried about the state of your application. As Tom Dale (EmberJS) described in the last Cage Match, we should aim to have applications that can reflect the same data between server and client at any point of time. You have many ways to do so, either by cookies, sessions or local storage.
Usually a SPA communicates with a REST based server, and hence perform idempotent operations to your data.
tl;dr You are not supposed to refresh anything from the server (styles or scripts, for instance), just the data that your application is handling. An initial single load is what SPA is all about.
separate your data and logic and reload the data using ajax whenever you want, for that i will suggest you use REST API to get the data from server.
SPA helps you to reduce the HTTP request again and again but its also require some http request to update a new data to view.
Well, you would have to unload the old existing code (i.e. the old AngularJS app, modules, controllers, services and so on). Theoretically, you could create a custom (randomized) app name (with all modules have this prefix for each unique build!) and then rebuild your app in the browser. But seriously.. that's a) very complex and b) will probably fail due memory leaks.
So, my answer is: Don't.
Caching issues
I would personally recommend to name/prefix all resources depended by a build with a unique id; either the build id, a scm hash, the timestamp or whatever like that. So, the url to the javascript is not domain.tld/resources/scripts.js but domain.tld/resources-1234567890/scripts.js which ensures that this path's content will never conflict with a (newer) version. You can choose your path/url like you want (depending on the underlaying structure: it is all virtually, can you remap urls, etcpp). It would be even not required that each version will exist forever (i.e. map all resources-(\d+)/ to resources/; however, this would be not nice for the concept of URLs.
Application state
Well, the question is how often will the application change that it would be important that such reloads are required. How long is the SPA open in a browser? Is it really impossible to support two versions at the same time? The client (the app in the browser) could even send its own version within the HTTP requests.
In the beginning of a new application, there are a lot of changes that would require a reload. But soon after your application has a solid state, the changes will be smaller and would not require a reload. The user itself will make more refreshs.. more than we ever expected :/
As with what everyone else is saying...
Don't, and while socket.io could work it's asking for trouble if you are VERY careful.
You have two options, upon server update invalidate any previous session (I would also give users a half hours notice or 5 minutes depending on application before maintenance would be done.
The second option is versioning. If they are on version 10, then they communicate with backend 10. If you release version 11 and they are still on 10 then they can still communicate with backend 10.
Remember Google wave? It failed for a reason. Too many people writing one source as the same time causes more problems then it solves.
use $state service. create state during loading page using ctor. after specified time re create state and load page.
function(state) {
state.stateCtor(action);
$state.transitionTo(action + '.detail', {}, {
notify: true
});
}
Versioning your files, so on every update increment version number and the browser will update it automaticallly.
My solution consists of several points.
While this is not important, but I send one JavaScript file to the client side, I use grunt to prepare my release. The same grunt file adds to the JavaScript tag a query with version number. Regardless of whether you have one file or lots of files, you need to add a version number to them. You may need to do this for resources as well. (check at the end for an example)
I send back in all my responses from the server (I use node) the version number of the app.
In Angular, when I receive any response, I check the version number against the version number loaded, if it has changed (this means the server code has been updated) then I alert the user that the app is going to reload. I use location.reload(true);
Once reloaded the browser will fetch all new files again because the version number in the script tag is different now, and so it will not get it from cache.
Hope this helps.
<script src="/scripts/spa.min.js?v=0.1.1-1011"></script>

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