Re: [Social-discuss] Which framework?

[Adrian Thurston]

The approach the I took was server based. Everyone has to sign up with 
some service, or they can host their own if they have the resources. 
Users access the service using their browser. I prefer this to the p2p 
approach because it lets people access their network from anywhere, 
home, office or while traveling. The p2p approach assumes that people 
take a computer with them, or introduces some requirement to connect 
home, without the benefit of SSL protection.

The server runs a daemon that listens for connections from other 
daemons. It is connected to a mysql database on that machine. It is 
responsible for sending and receiving messages to the network of 
friends. It also handles encryption, as that is not convenient in 
web-app languages.

The PHP frontend is also connected to the same database so that it is 
able to display the messages received. When the user takes some action, 
the PHP frontend submits the message to the daemon, which encrypts it 
and distributes it to the user's network of friends.

-Adrian

Henry Litwhiler wrote:

> I agree entirely. Do you think that the PHP install should be something 
> that only the person hosting it should have access to (i.e. everyone 
> goes to 127.0.0.1, and it is nothing more than a quick and convenient 
> way to interface with the GNU Social install), or that everyone should, 
> in essence, have their own GNU Social "site"?
>
> My idea is that everyone can have this sort of "backbone" application 
> running on their computer (perhaps in Python or C). This application 
> handles all the "behind-the-scenes" interactions between GNU Social 
> installs, through XMPP or another (perhaps original) protocol.
>
> Users can (optionally) install the PHP frontend to an (Apache?) server. 
> This PHP frontend loads data from the backend, and displays it to *only 
> one user* - the person who installed the PHP frontend. Generally, this 
> PHP frontend will only accessed from the computer it was installed on 
> (127.0.01), but the user can also get at it from other locations (work, 
> school, vacation, etc.) by typing in the IP address of the computer the 
> PHP install is running on.
>
> It could be compared to our current email system: you don't log in to 
> your friends' email accounts to send them emails - you log in to your 
> own email account, and send them emails. The browser frontend is nothing 
> more than a convenience.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> --
> Henry L.