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Subject: 
Re: Musings on an open-source Brickshelf replacement
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.general
Date: 
Wed, 8 Jun 2005 17:46:21 GMT
Viewed: 
843 times
  
In lugnet.general, David Eaton wrote:

   Oh, mainly I was thinking in terms of expansion making the network stronger. If it’s more generic, other communities will use it, and possibly add features, optimization, and potentially even bandwidth.

Well, that’s a fair point. But it still makes me nervous -- pretty soon you could have people pulling it in several different directions, and morphing it into something that’s not really ideal for our purposes anymore.

  
   Well yes, that’s the whole idea. I’d propose writing the viewer in REALbasic, which is easy and powerful, and can compile directly for MacOS, Windows, and Linux with a native UI on each.

Huh. Don’t think I’ve even heard of RealBasic. Some sort of cross-platform language like Java was meant to be?

Heh, if you haven’t heard of it yet, you will (er, though I guess you just did). Yes, it’s much like that, except that it doesn’t suck. And instead of using a bytecode interpreter, it compiles to native machine code for each plaftorm, just like C (but portable).

   MOCPages is basically the idea of a central indexer. People host their images elsewhere, and write page content on MOCPages. So each “page” is intended to be dedicated to a particular MOC, with some limited HTML formatting, probably similar in nature to LUGNET FTX. I think each MOC has associated categories and whatnot, and also room for web visitors to rate and comment on particular pages/MOCs.

Well, that does sound similar to what we’ve been talking about then.

   It’s been out for a while because the site owner left on a worldwide vacation recently, and won’t be back for another month or whatnot.

That does illustrate the problem with any site maintained by one person, though. And if the owner gets hit by a bus, the site and its data are probably lost for good. What we need is something like this but maintained by a committee (about 5 people would be ideal), so that when one or several people disappear, others can take up the slack.

   And as far as that idea goes, I’m not sure how it would be any different making it open source, since a central index isn’t really “community-run”.

Sure it is, if it’s set up that way. It’s not run by peers, but it could be run by a central committee rather than by one person. Look at virtually any large project on SourceForge, for example; that’s how they operate. (SourceForge itself operates that way, for that matter.)

  
  
   I kinda wonder if you could combine the two.

Of course, it’d be more work to develop, requiring both a web server and the BrickTella app. But it’s certainly worth considering.

Yeah. It’d be a pain to write. And I don’t know much about writing webservers themselves. I’m that step below where I know how to use and configure webservers, but not write them. But provided it ever got off the ground, then woot! It’d function pretty much the same as BrickShelf for all intents and purposes UI-wise. The bandwidth would just be shared-- and there’d be (probably) a much lower level of attention needed on the central server side.

Right. I’ve written web servers, which is not hard to do (e.g. Write a Web Server in 100 Lines), though writing an efficient web server is harder. Integrating it with a distributed data-storage network would still be a bit of a challenge, though. But it’s doable.

   Admittedly, though, the central server would still be the limiting factor. If it DID get bogged down, then ... ? It would be single-point-of-failure from a web perspective, although still *usable* from a non-web-client perpsective (although only “pull” requests would work if the central server went down-- nothing new would get added to the system).

Right. But the point is that if the central server were open-source, it couldn’t go down permanently. Even if everybody on its committee suddenly got whisked away to Guatanamo Bay, others in the community could take the code and data and set it back up somewhere else.

Best,
Joe



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Musings on an open-source Brickshelf replacement
 
(...) Oh, mainly I was thinking in terms of expansion making the network stronger. If it's more generic, other communities will use it, and possibly add features, optimization, and potentially even bandwidth. (...) Hmm... Yeah, if users can (...) (19 years ago, 7-Jun-05, to lugnet.general)

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