nlon

Pronounced neigh-lon.

A bidirectional communication protocol that can be used over raw sockets, WebSockets or any other method of transmission.

Its main use case is situations where you have a transport layer without any structure, e.g. TCP sockets where you stream arbitrary bytes. The role of nlon here is to provide a convenient layer on top of the transport to give shape to the data being transmitted.

This repository includes the protocol specification and a reference implementation in JavaScript.

Features

• 📦 Almost no dependencies
  • The core uses 3 dependencies: pino, nanoid, ndjson
• 🔩 Protocol-agnostic
  • Works the same over TCP as WebSockets by using Adapters
• ⚡ Simple specification
  • The whole spec is a ~5 min read
• 🎉 Express-inspired API for writing Servers
  • Register (route) handlers to respond to incoming messages
• 📨 Streaming supported by design
  • Protocol permits transmitting data in multiple chunks

Adapters

• nlon-socket for TCP sockets
• nlon-websocket for the browser

Install

• pnpm: pnpm add @elementbound/nlon
• npm: npm i @elementbound/nlon
• yarn: yarn add @elementbound/nlon

Usage

See the reference implementation.

Documentation

• Protocol specification
• Example flow
• API docs
  • Or generate your own with JSDoc: pnpm -r doc
• Tutorials
  • Implementing a server
  • Implementing a peer
• Examples
  • WebSocket example

License

This package is under the MIT License.