Pure client apps

Porting Pure-Client Apps

Apps which are designed to do all work on the client side (in the browser) are particularly easy to port to Sandstorm. Apps written in the Unhosted style or using remoteStorage generally fall into this category.

For such apps, we recommend basing your server on our Raw API Example. In fact, you can likely fork that code and use it nearly verbatim; just drop you client-side HTML, CSS, and Javascript into the client directory and adjust your code to do storage via HTTP GET/PUT/DELETE requests under /var.

Keep in mind that each Sandstorm app instance should represent a single "document", or otherwise the minimal unit of data that a user might want to share independently. So, if your app currently features "save" and "load" actions that ask for a location, remove that, and instead automatically save to a hard-coded location under /var.

Caveat: Collaboration

The down side of pure-client apps is that they are hard to make collaborative. If multiple users open a file at once, they will likely clobber each other's changes. Once your app is on Sandstorm, you may want to consider extending it for collaboration by implementing a WebSocket connection that receives an event stream from other clients. In the server code, you will need to extend WebSessionImpl to override the openWebSocket() method of WebSession. Feel free to ask sandstorm-dev if you need help.