Distant Web

A library for testing your application without the need for a Citrix channel by providing APIs compatible with Distant and Distant VDI and providing an implementation based on the browser native window.open() method.

Usage

JavaScript

Install using npm:

npm install @rbbn/distant-web

or yarn:

yarn add @rbbn/distant-web

Here's some example code from an application. Distant Web is effectively a drop-in replacement for Pull VChannel, as you can see below the only difference between this and using a Citrix channel is that we are passing a distant-web connection rather than a pull-vchannel connection to distant's createController(). This code does however need to be run from within a browser due to the fact that Distant Web uses window.open().

import { createController } from '@rbbn/distant'

import { createConnection } from '@rbbn/distant-web'

const textEncoder = new TextEncoder()

const distantWebConnection = createConnection()

// here we pass a distant-web connection rather one from pull-vchannel
const distantController = createController(distantWebConnection)

// creating a session will now open a window with window.open()
const session = await distantController.createSession({
  id: 1,
  url: "http://example.com/remote.html"
})

// we use the session as we would normally
session.sendMessage(textEncoder.encode('hello'))

On the remote app side of this example we don't need to do anything differently. The remote app will be opened in a new browser window and distant-web will provided all that is needed for distant-remote to work.

import distantRemote from '@rbbn/distant-remote'

const textDecoder = new TextDecoder()

distantRemote.on('message', (message) => {
  if (textDecoder.decode(message) === 'hello') {
    distantRemote.setWindowVisible(true)
  }
})

Platform support

Support for different platforms is handled by passing in a windowFactory to Distant Web's createConnection() function. Distant Web provides window factories for both browsers and Electron. If no windowFactory is specified the browser windowFactory is used.

import {
  createConnection,
  createWebWindow,
  createElectronWindow
} from '@rbbn/distant-web'

// if we're running in a browser (this is the default if none specified)
const distantWebConnection = createConnection({
  windowFactory: createWebWindow
})

// if we're running in the Electron main process
const distantWebConnection = createConnection({
  windowFactory: createElectronWindow
})

Known Issues

Web Window Factory

• When trying to resize a window to very small dimensions the window will fall back to using larger dimensions. The minimum size of a window is usually between 100x100 and 280x225 depending on the platform

• When using Electron or Chrome on Windows 10 the window's title bar will still be visible when it should be hidden

• When using Chrome on Mac the window will be small when it should be hidden. The window might change size while it should still be hidden.