DOMException: An invalid or illegal string was specified

[siegfried]

I cannot create a InteractionContext in browser (Latest Firefox and Chrome). After a while of troubleshooting, I believe the issue lies here.

I tried this successfully in browser console:

new WebSocket('ws://localhost:1338')

This gives the error: Uncaught DOMException: An invalid or illegal string was specified

new WebSocket('ws://localhost:1338', { maxPayload: 128 * 1024 * 1024 })

[KtorZ]

Eew. Yes, the so-called "isomorphic" Javascript WebSockets aren't quite isomorphic. We resorted to building our own wrapper around the websocket API to cover both browser and node. Note however that the browser support in the TypeScript client is only a best effort as Ogmios is mostly intended to be used server-side in a controlled environment.

[siegfried]

So is Ogmios not supposed to be exposed to the public?

[KtorZ]

@siegfried in principle no; Ogmios exposes the cardano-node's node-to-client protocols which have been designed to be local protocols between a limited set of clients and one node acting as a server. Some protocols are quite heavy on the node (for example, the chain-sync protocol can drive the node at 200% CPU for an extended period of time).

This isn't a security risk though, but more of a resource constraint issue. We've been experimenting having hundreds of clients connected to a node. And while this works, it is quite slow (especially if all clients are doing chain-sync). So in general, no, exposing an instance over the public internet is not a good idea unless you are in a somewhat controlled environment or, unless there's way to spread the load over many relays.

One thing I still envision in the long-run are relays running and exposing Ogmios for clients. If we take a gross approximation of 100 clients per relay, with a thousand of relays we can already get into serving a reasonable number of clients; provided that the clients have some load-balancing logic allowing them to pick a relay that isn't too busy.

Spinning up new relays on-demand to cope with spikes should also be relatively easy.

[KtorZ]

Fixed in #195