Consider communicating with Brackets-node using something other than websockets

[core-ai-bot]

Issue by peterflynn
Friday Dec 20, 2013 at 05:07 GMT
Originally opened as adobe/brackets#6282

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We've received a bunch of reports over the past year from users who can't install extensions and/or can't use Live Preview -- where the cause turned out to be networking-related issues such as antivirus software, firewalls, or HTTPS proxies that blocked the socket connection from Brackets to Brackets-node.

Once file watchers also rely on node, the impact of this issue will be larger than ever before.

Given that general IPC in other apps doesn't seem to have massive known problems with antivirus software, I'm wondering if we could use a different IPC method to exchange the snippets of JSON with Brackets-node...

Here are some examples of bugs that got filed because of this:

• [CLOSED] Defer most Quick View processing until after delay #6079
• possibly [CLOSED] RTL alignment for line that its text are all RTL #6278
• possibly [CLOSED] Fix for issue #4562 #4228
• [CLOSED] Fix issue #4693: Tree context menu behaves unpredictably while naming new file #4688
• https://groups.google.com/d/msg/brackets-dev/qIF0n5BMmqI/UXGQy1j4K6EJ
• some of [CLOSED] [Core][MAC only][File Watcher]: There is no error message when creating an external file with invalid name. #6188 (the@busykai part, not the original filer)
• [CLOSED] Turkish translate done #5250

[core-ai-bot]

Comment by njx
Friday Dec 20, 2013 at 19:56 GMT

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To@dangoor to track for an architecture discussion. Marking medium priority since we seem to hit this in a number of cases.

[core-ai-bot]

Comment by dangoor
Thursday Jan 02, 2014 at 16:31 GMT

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@peterflynn The extension installation case is a bit more complicated. Some of those (like #6188's part from busykai) are not related to Brackets connecting to brackets-node, but rather brackets-node connecting to the registry. I think most of the extension installation problems I've seen have been in that category.

#6079 is a good counter example and I hadn't seen that. It seems bizarre to me that web sockets would be blocked for some reason, but there you have it...

[core-ai-bot]

Comment by iwehrman
Tuesday Jan 07, 2014 at 19:49 GMT

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@gruehle pointed out that we should at the very least show a warning message on startup if Brackets can't connect to the Node process. File watchers make this especially important.

[core-ai-bot]

Comment by gbade
Monday Mar 03, 2014 at 10:23 GMT

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Hello, i recently started using brackets and just this morning, on starting the IDE, i keep getting a "failed to connect to node.js, extension requires node.js installed"
also -
"[brackets-git] ExpectedError: max connection attempts reached"

But i have node.js installed already. even ran node--version in command and got the current version i'm using - v0.10.15

PS - I am at work and my internet access is through a HTTP proxy. despite that, throughout last week, it did work. Don't know what's the matter now.

[core-ai-bot]

Comment by dangoor
Monday Mar 03, 2014 at 14:23 GMT

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@gbade Are you running Windows XP? Brackets 36 has a problem running node on XP systems.

[core-ai-bot]

Comment by gbade
Monday Mar 03, 2014 at 14:30 GMT

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@dangoor I'm running brackets on Windows 7. I managed to solve the issue by modifying my internet options by bypassing proxy for local server. Although, i did notice that i couldn't install extra extensions from the extension manager.

[core-ai-bot]

Comment by dangoor
Monday Mar 03, 2014 at 14:33 GMT

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@gbade Brackets 37 adds a "proxy" configuration item that will fix the extension manager installation issue. See #6911