[Seaside-dev] P2P CMS/PM system with SeaSide and TeaTime

[Aran Dunkley]

Hi Andreas,

Our Very Good Reason (tm) for building a p2p serverless system is
because our organisation (Organic Design) and some other associated
projects we've been working with are very passionate about the "bottom
up" philosophy.

We're particularly interested in building a network that includes
content management and project management tools that work in a mesh-like
way where it all continues to operate properly within small regions when
their connectivity to the larger network breaks down.

We believe its important for communities to have access to such
independent systems, and it's becoming even more important as more
communities are pushed below the poverty line and entire nation's
economies are collapsing.

We've connected with other like-minded organisations that want the same
things and together we now have some funds to develop it.

Currently we're in the process of specifying the application clearly for
developers, and asking around on lists such as this one to find what
technology and frameworks would best suit the idea.

Cheers,
Aran

On 11/01/11 20:09, Andreas Raab wrote:
> So basically you're saying that content is going to be stored in a DHT?
> That sounds reasonable if you're trying to avoid any particular
> centralized "server" instance but, honestly, I would a) not take that
> approach unless I had a Very Good Reason (tm) for doing so (what exactly
> is wrong with server to begin with? and how is that not addressed by
> adding fail-over and replication capabilities?) and b) Croquet/Cobalt
> will not be helping you with your DHT work.
> 
> Unfortunately, the Croquet site is down right now (we're working on
> getting it back up) otherwise I'd add a link to our Hedgehog
> presentation which might clarify what Croquet is and what it isn't.
> 
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas
> 
> On 1/10/2011 10:37 PM, Aran Dunkley wrote:
>> Sorry for the confusion, maybe P2P is too general a term, and I may have
>> misunderstood the specifics of what components do what in the Cobalt
>> system. Here's more information on what we're wanting to develop:
>>
>> The users will be running a p2p application which forms a DHT from all
>> the currently online instances. The CMS/Project management application
>> is used via the browser like a normal web-application, but the address
>> of it resolves to localhost and uses the local p2p application is it's
>> backend "web-server" and the DHT as the persistent storage layer with
>> local caching as necessary etc.
>>
>>
>> The users then go to the URL of the project management system
>>
>> On 11/01/11 19:24, Andreas Raab wrote:
>>> Hi Aran -
>>>
>>> I'm not sure who you talked to but there's really no meaningful
>>> definition of the term "P2P" that applies to Teatime as implemented in
>>> Hedgehog (which is what Cobalt is built upon). Teatime is a
>>> synchronization mechanism for distributed objects, but it can be built
>>> with or without using P2P communication. Early Teatime versions used P2P
>>> (rather: multi-cast) but the version implemented in Hedgehog (and
>>> Cobalt) does not use P2P communication, for various reasons.
>>>
>>>  From what I've seen in the Cobalt discussions[1,2], I would agree with
>>> the person who mentioned the replication features of CouchDB or similar.
>>> It looks like this would be a better and more straightforward fit with
>>> what you've been describing in that discussion.
>>>
>>> [1]http://groups.google.com/group/opencobalt/browse_thread/thread/ae071311a099be9a
>>>
>>>
>>> [2]http://groups.google.com/group/opencobalt/browse_thread/thread/9829a8971570ba5c
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>    - Andreas
>>>
>>> On 1/10/2011 3:12 PM, Aran Dunkley wrote:
>>>> Hi, I'm part of a development team who are helping an organisation to
>>>> architect a free CMS based project-management system that they want to
>>>> work in a P2P network rather than using a centralised web-server.
>>>>
>>>> We've researched existing CMS's such as Plone to see if they could be
>>>> modified to operate on top of a DHT but found that they rely too
>>>> heavily
>>>> on querying methodologies that are incompatible with the P2P paradigm.
>>>>
>>>> I talked to the OpenCobalt developers and they were very positive about
>>>> the feasibility of the idea and gave me a lot of good advice and links
>>>> to check out including Seaside which seems like it could the ideal
>>>> technology to build our system in.
>>>>
>>>> We have a specific application in mind that we'd like to develop which
>>>> is a project-management/workflow environment running in a CMS with some
>>>> other standard tools such as wiki/blog, but rather than a web-server
>>>> we'd be using a local P2P app as the backend. I'm wondering what you
>>>> guys, the Seaside developers think of the idea of extracting the
>>>> TeaTime
>>>> P2P aspect of OpenCobalt and running Seaside on it so we could build
>>>> P2P
>>>> browser-based applications?
>>>>
>>>> We have a good budget available for this and will be developing it as a
>>>> completely free open source system, so we'd also like to hear from
>>>> developers who may be interested in working on the project too.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks a lot,
>>>> Aran
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> seaside-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
>>>> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/seaside-dev
>>>>
>>
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