Browser guide

This guide will walk you through how to run 0x Mesh directly in the browser and discuss some of the advantages and drawbacks of doing so.

Background

Mesh is written in Go, but can be compiled to WebAssembly and run directly in the browser. This makes it possible for users to share orders and trade directly with one another without relying on any third-party server or database. This approach comes with a lot of advantages, but also has some drawbacks:

Advantages

• Increased decentralization

• Little to no hosting costs

• Ability to trade experimental/niche assets

Drawbacks

• Longer warm-up time

• Increased risk of trade collisions

• Consumes more end-user resources

@0x/mesh-browser

For your convenience, we've published an NPM package called @0x/mesh-browser which includes the WebAssembly bytecode and a lightweight wrapper around it. This package is used exactly the same way as any other NPM package and using it feels exactly like using a native TypeScript/JavaScript library. To find more information on optimizing the startup time of using Mesh in the browser, refer to the next section on the @0x/mesh-browser-lite package.

@0x/mesh-browser-lite

We've published a lightweight version of the @0x/mesh-browser package -- the @0x/mesh-browser-lite package -- that provides an identical abstraction around a browser-based Mesh node without requiring that Wasm bytecode be bundled with the rest of the webpage's code. Additionally, this package makes use of the WebAssembly's streaming functionality, which could provide a speedup to load times for users of browser-based Mesh.

Using this package is a bit more complicated than using the @0x/mesh-browser package. WebAssembly binaries for each version of 0x-mesh that has an associated @0x/mesh-browser-lite package can be found in the 0x-mesh release notes. The user will need to serve the appropriate binary on a server or CDN of their choice. The package gives users the option of providing a URL to the loadMeshStreamingFromURLAsync function or a Response object to the loadMeshStreamingAsync function in their application. The URL or Response option should be chosen in such a way that they load the Mesh Binary that is being served.

Installation

To install the @0x/mesh-browser NPM package, simply run:

npm install --save @0x/mesh-browser

Or if you are using yarn:

yarn add @0x/mesh-browser

Similarly, the @0x/mesh-browser-lite NPM package can be installed by running:

npm install --save @0x/mesh-browser-lite

Or if you are using yarn:

yarn add @0x/mesh-browser-lite

Documentation

• Documentation for the @0x/mesh-browser package is available at

  0x-org.gitbook.io/mesh/browser-bindings/browser.

• Documentation for the @0x/mesh-browser-lite package is available at

  0x-org.gitbook.io/mesh/browser-bindings/browser-lite.

Example usage

The webpack-example directory and the webpack-example-lite directory include examples of how to use the @0x/mesh-browser and the @0x/mesh-browser-lite packages, respectively.