GUN has a unique and powerful API. We recommend you learn it, but we have started shim.js to provide some abstraction/wrappers that look similar to Firebase, Parse, or other tools. This is not a complete shim to those APIs, nor will it ever be. It is just a gateway drug to playing with gun, so use responsibly.

Contributions would be highly appreciated, consider this the place to add common abstractions/wrappers from other systems that other developers would be familiar with. It will be a community driven shim.

var Gun = require('gun');
require('gun/lib/shim');

Without a build tool, you'll need to include each extension that the shim depends upon - as shown below.

With a build tool, you should know how to bundle them into 1 file based on the tags below, then use that.

<script src="/gun.js"></script>
<script src="/gun/lib/open.js"></script>
<script src="/gun/lib/bye.js"></script>
<script src="/gun/lib/shim.js"></script>

This will loosely approximate Firebase's behavior. Here is an example:

var gun = Gun('http://localhost:8080/gun'), ID = 'asdf';

gun.get('interview/' + ID).on('value', function(tree){
  console.log(tree); // no need for calling snapshot
});

This will give you the full document every time it changes. It works for documents with circular references too!

var interview = gun.get('interview/' + ID);

var data = {
  id: ID,
  position: {
    role: "engineer",
    experience: "ninja"
  }
};
data.position.parent = data;

interview.put(data);

When the data is saved with put it will trigger .on('value', cb) to be called with the full interview document.

Try this shim out now, with this live demo on jsbin!

This shim wraps gun.open in the extended API.

This loosely approximates Firebase's behavior. Remember though, GUN uses put instead of set - just as a tip. Here is how it works:

var gun = Gun('http://localhost:8080/gun'), sessionID = 'asdf';

var tab = gun.get('marknadal').get('tabs').get(sessionID).put('online');

tab.onDisconnect().put('offline');

We can use this to create a "presence" system, such that another user can track whether their friend is online or not based on how many tabs they have open:

gun.get('ambercazzell').get('friends').get('marknadal').get('tabs').on('value', function(sessions){
  for(var tab in sessions){
    if('online' === sessions[tab]){
      UI.update("Your friend is online!");
      return;
    }
  }
  UI.update("Your friend is offline.");
});

This shim proxies gun.bye in the extended API.

A cleaner implementation of Firebase's

var connectedRef = new Firebase('http://abc.firebaseio.com/.info/connected');
connectedRef.on('value', function(snap){
  //...
});

Instead, just do

var gun = Gun('http://localhost:8080/gun');

gun.connected(function(boo){
  if(boo){
    UI.notify("You are back online!");
    gun.get('status').onDisconnect().put('offline');
  } else {
    UI.notify("You are offline!");
  }
});

Note: GUN uses lazy loading to conserve bandwidth and battery! So connected will only fire after the first read or a write has been performed. This is not a bug.

Please report if connected().on('value', cb) would be preferred.