Over a decade ago we introduced BitTorrent technology and BitTorrent clients, and the Internet was profoundly changed. This week we are aiming to revolutionize the web once again by integrating the power of BitTorrent with the most familiar experience on a computer: the browser. Today, we are proud to announce the alpha release of BitTorrent Torque.
BitTorrent Torque is a JavaScript interface to a custom torrent client that exposes all the power of BitTorrent to web developers. Simply put, it allows anyone to utilize our powerful technology to create completely fresh and new experiences for users with just a couple lines of code.
This alpha allows BitTorrent to move beyond desktop clients. We believe web developers are pioneers when it comes to creating beautiful, intuitive user experiences. Torque will empower them to create powerful applications that will appeal to broad audiences. To demonstrate this, today we are also launching Torque Labs. Torque Labs showcases various web apps that demonstrate just a fraction of what can be achieved using Torque. These demos include:
Paddle Over: Drag and drop file transfers between computers, social sharing tools, social network integration and more.
OneClick: Turn your torrent downloads into normal in-browser downloads.
Torque is another step towards our commitment to empowering both developers and users. We strongly believe in this technology and the impact it can have. Torque Labs is part of our ongoing commitment to maintain an open conversation between our developers and our developer community. We are confident that together we can create some really kick-ass applications.
Find out more at torque.bittorrent.com
you are awesome…
This is Awesome! Being able to tap in the p2p filesharing echosystem via a javascript library…. pure awesomeness. Thanks! Will play with the JS stuff tonight!
Any chance for a Safari extension?
Perhaps…OneClick is open source and available at https://github.com/bittorrenttorque/oneclick if you’d like to take a crack at it.
We’ve actually been doing the OneClick stuff in LittleShoot for many years (http://www.littleshoot.org), and you actually don’t need the Chrome extension to deal with MIME types. It’s wild the way information flows asynchronously around the web — reminds me of lightstreamer over in Italy doing AJAX for like 3 years before the world discovered it with Google Suggest and ultimately Google Maps.
That said, I still think it’s super cool and should be way more ubiquitous — bravo! We also never made any javascript lib publicly available.
I just tried it, but it asks me for user/password. what are they?
In what context? Can you provide a screenshot? Thanks for your interest, I’d love to get this sorted out
The same problem: asks for password-UN. No info on that.
Would you mind posting a screenshot? I could use some help reproducing
http://i.imgur.com/0NiPL.png
Really promising !!!
Any chance of including it in the base chrome distribution by talking to Google guys, that would be really awesome.
Why is there no Firefox or Linux support? OneClick is Chrome only and Paddle Over asks me to install an MSI file(Windows Installer). You guys need to get this working on more then just Windows otherwise it defeats the point of such a thing.
OneClick is specifically a Chrome extension, though it works on both Windows and Mac (Linux support has been discussed, but we’re already juggling a lot of balls over here). PaddleOver should work on Windows and Mac as well…I’ll make sure to update the splash page to notify linux users that it won’t work. If there’s a demand for a Linux version we’re of course all ears
I demand a version for Linux, mostly for Firefox though.
So, does the web browser have to be open for the torrents to download? Because in some contexts Chrome stops downloading files ifChrome gets closed
Very handy but is it anonymous downloading or will you need to set your browser to private browsing?
I would not rely on these for anonymity. The goal was simply to show off the capability to other developers that might be interested in working with the api. You’re more than welcome to write your own however, and you could probably easily make a paddleover knock off that used private torrents.
check out the source code at
https://github.com/bittorrenttorque/paddleover.com
I’n thinking…
p2p build over the assumption that everybody is a seeder at the same time it downloads, and that at least a high % of the people let the file seeding at least 1:1, or a lot more..
in my case, its 2:1 for ‘really extended, very fast things( serie chapter of the week), 5:1 for normal, and 25:1 for really uncommon things.
I hope this idea (Torque, OneClick, or whatever app born from here), have it on account.
if not, the p2p wil die… Only the ‘big’ downloads, supported by companies whom use p2p as downloading system, will exist.
Hmm, this gave me an idea, not sure if it would work though. With internet speeds, especially upload speeds increasing, would it be possible for webpages to be downloaded the same way torrents are.
So, for example. Person A has loaded a webpage. Instead of getting the page directly from the server, Person B would get Person A’s IP from the server and like with torrents, download the data from Person A’s computer directly.
As many people would have the same page open at one time (at least on popular sites) downloading of the page will be very quick.
This would greatly reduce cost and load on the server, allowing people to run very popular sites from their home computer.
This is certainly a good idea, but probably most valuable in the case of large static files. For instance, a vimeo type site could really reduce their server costs buy utilizing torrents. That being said, its probably going to take a few more electrical storms on the east coast to get the big players to make the switch.
You know what would be even better? Installing this sort of thing on gaming consoles such as the PS vita and PS3. They do have javascript support and it would cause direct competition with Xbox Live, eventually tipping the scales on the amount of media content, possibly causing people to switch over to the play station network. Wouldn’t that be just awesome?
Installed the oneClick extencion on chrome in debian and it doesn’t work. When i click on a torrent link it downloads the file “something”.torrent.
Ah, we don’t have support for linux right now. There’s a bunch of interest internally for running on linux, so I’ll keep you posted
Very nice! This is a big change and +ve!
I eagerly anticipate how this turns out, as it’ll have profound effects on easing server load when providing downloads to particularly large or popular projects and software. No longer will the distributed method be limited to the power user!
This is great! Does Torque support uTP for doing NAT traversal through STUN?
what’s stun? it certainly supports utp for nat traversal
Awesome! STUN is the set of techniques used by most applications requiring NAT traversal (Skype, Facetime, uTorrent…). I saw that uTorrent implemented “its own form of STUN” here: https://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=60602
I was asking because I tried sending a file from one computer to another using Paddleover. Both computers were behind NATs and the transfer did not succeed… The issue must be somewhere else. Thanks for your answer and long live Bittorrent Torque! I can’t wait to see more!
the one click extension is not working for my chrome…i tried to download many torrents but not even a single starts!!??do i need to change any setting??please help me..
Please check in to our forums for these types of issues. Thanks! http://forum.bittorrent.com/
I just love it ! but i would like to see a central location for support Q&A in the forum or on the website
Its definitely something we’ve considered. I generally use twitter to interact with devs directly. alternatively use torque@bittorrent.com. I’m happy to help!
Awesome, will defo start developing with this asap
Great to here…Feel free to ask for help. If you’re looking for a good place to start I’d head to http://btappjs.com