Coppola is a HTML5 Remote viewer (currently it only supports VNC) with one goal: To be as fast as a classic native remote desktop.
- Uncompressed encodings (raw, copyrect)
- Uses your desktop character set, which makes it very comfortable
- It's fast
- No plugins needed in current browsers
- Works with every RFB-compatible VNC server
- Supports requireJS
- More and Low bandwidth encodings: ZRLE, Hextile
- Custom cursor support
- Better documentation
- WSS support for encrypted communication
- Non-VNC Authentication (VNC authentication only uses DES)
- And more !
NOTICE: This is alpha, compressed encodings are not supported yet and some features like secured websockets (wss:) support are not implemented yet. Also, you might encounter a few bugs, open issues or start coding by yourself (that would be great)!
This is not a warning, but an encouragement: Test it, use it, give feedback, help making it better!
- You need NodeJS and a fast browser (I'm currently only developing using Chrome and recent Firefox versions).
- Run node coppola/server/ws_proxy.js %public port% %vnc host% %vnc port%. Now there's a proxy running that allows you to connect to your vnc server via the coppola web frontend
- Just copy the testbench to your webserver and try it
(Yep, that's very brief, I know)
Where's the name coming from
In E.T.A Hofmanns short-story 'Der Sandmann' Copolla (ital. eye cavities) is trader specialized in lenses and wheather glasses. He sells the protagonist a lens which, in short, causes a outbreak of his schizophrenia. When you develop a few days on vnc-encoding problems you sometimes think you're going crazy, too.
Why not participating in, for example guacamole or noVNC
I started looking at the noVNC sourcecode and why it was rather slow when connecting to a local vm while native viewers were very fast. I quickly realized that fixing most issues on the noVNC code would end up in a rewrite, so I started from scratch. (That's not meant to be FUD, Joel did a great job, he knows what he's doing and noVNC supports almost any browser out there). I also started a VNC viewer in 2010 called FuzzyKitten, but this was more a C# programming practice and handled VNC on the server side, so I already have some experience in VNC client programming. And last but not least, cappola is designed to be easily embedabble in your application!
Whats the current development state?
Currently I'm working on further encodings, namely hextile (support is almost finished, but there are some bugs) and ZRLE. But before I'm going to start this, I will setup improve the test-enviromnent (and I'm thinking hardly about how to properly test the encodings).
Does it work in IE?
I havent tested it in IE10 yet, but it won't work in version < 9 ever. Those browsers are slow, and there are viewers like noVNC that support those browsers if you dare to use flash. IE10 support and maybe IE9 (there's a websocket bridge plugin for this and maybe I'll use the flash websocket emulation)
Were those questions really asked frequently
No.