Re: [Social-discuss] Which framework?

[Adrian Thurston]

Hello GNU-Social,

My name is Adrian and for a long while I have been interested in 
distributed social networking. I'm the person behind DSNP, which has 
been mentioned here before. DSNP has been a great learning experience 
for me, and fun too. At one point I had my immediate family using my 
2-node network of social-networking sites.

Unfortunately, it has grown to the point where it's too much work for me 
to do alone. Either I must redirect my efforts to another project with 
momentum behind it, or stop development. I'm hoping that GNU-Social can 
be that other project. For that to work there needs to be some harmony 
of design ideals. So here I present mine:

Separating a social application into backend and frontend is the right 
approach.

The backend is basically a message distribution system and associated 
database that is aware of social concepts. I think we should not be 
afraid of designing and implementing a new protocol. A new protocol will 
give the maximum freedom to make what we need. Piggybacking on other 
protocols means also piggybacking on the design goals and limitations of 
those protocols.

The frontnend provides the user's view into the social space. For this 
you use a language like PHP.

-Adrian

Henry Litwhiler wrote:
> I've said it once, and I'll say it again: PHP is a valid frontend option 
> for GNU Social, but I would strongly question it's suitability for the 
> backbone of a project such as this. A small, fast, desktop application 
> that users run to change settings, and serve out data to other users 
> could be written in something like Python.
>
> How about such an application runs in the background on all GNU Social 
> computers (or, because it's been suggested, ARM-based power-outlet-sized 
> computers) at all times, receiving new posts (if it gets turned off, it 
> will load everything it's missed from the network) and sending out data. 
> Rather than having everyone running their own server, with their own GNU 
> Social PHP install serving data to /everyone/, we could use the PHP 
> install as a /private/ GUI - users point their browser to 127.0.0.1, and 
> load up a Facebook-like application with *all* their friends' latest 
> posts, images, videos, etc.
>
> This particular itch (the need for an easy, extensible GUI) is certainly 
> best scratched by PHP. But to make PHP the backbone of GNU Social would 
> be a gross misuse of PHP - it simply isn't designed for (nor is it best 
> for) such a task, whereas something like Python /is/.
>
> The Python application wouldn't display things to the browser, and I'm 
> not saying that we use Python to replace PHP's role as our web 
> application language - instead, we can use it to manage the backend 
> communications between GNU Social users.
>
> --
> Henry L.