Re: Contest for cool apps

[John Karahalis]

This is an interesting problem. I didn't realize that Open Web Apps
allowed only one manifest per domain.

Roping in the MDN development team for their thoughts. What if we
allowed demo authors to submit the URL of some webpage to the Derby, and
then frame that webpage as we have been framing other demos? The only
challenge with this approach is making sure authors don't edit their
demos after the deadline.

On 03/26/2012 12:05 PM, Janet Swisher wrote:
> cc'ing John Karahalis, who manages the Dev Derby.
>
> We've had some discussions in Developer Engagement about having a month
> with open web apps as the Dev Derby theme. One issue is that normally,
> demos are hosted on dev.m.o, which means that under the current setup,
> there could be only one app manifest on the site. We're going to have to
> support externally-hosted demos in a couple of months when we do
> WebSockets, but I'm not sure of the details.
>
> On 3/22/12 11:58 AM, Mike Morgan wrote:
>> Maybe we could join forces with the dev derby effort?
>> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/devderby
>>
>> Mike
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Ron Piovesan"<rpio...@mozilla.com>
>> To: ap...@mozilla.com
>> Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 7:25:10 AM
>> Subject: Contest for cool apps
>>
>>
>>
>> Mark Ruddock ( @MarkRuddock )
>> 3/22/12 7:18 AM
>> “Inception Explained” – HTML5 site explains Inception plot in just a
>> few mouse scrolls j.mp/GMJhbG
>>
>>
>> I'd love to find a way to get cool, quirky sites like this on the
>> Marketplace
>>
>>
>> I'm thinking contests. What do you think? We have the budget to give
>> out cash prizes and we can also offer promo slots on the Marketplace.
>>
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>>
>
>

--
John Karahalis
Developer Engagement
@openjck

[Joe Stagner]

How many entrants do you think we'd get.

I could host them on one of my servers if we place some restrictions on server functionality (PHP, NoSQL etc)

Joe

--
Thanks,
Joe Stagner
Web Developer Technologies
Mozilla
@MisfitGeek
www.MisfitGeek.com

[John Karahalis]

Awesome! Thanks for the offer, Joe!

I would estimate about 20-40 submissions.

> _______________________________________________
> dev-mdn mailing list
> dev...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-mdn

[John Karahalis]

Trying again with "Reply All". Apparently "Reply List" drops people.

--

[Les Orchard]

On 3/26/12 8:41 PM, John Karahalis wrote:
> This is an interesting problem. I didn't realize that Open Web Apps
> allowed only one manifest per domain.

Wow, I didn't realize that either. That seems like a huge drawback to
hosting OWA manifests in general.

I suppose we could try to put together something using per-demo
subdomains and a DNS wildcard entry like deviantart.com does per-user,
but that sounds... troublesome.

I wonder how the app marketplace is planning to handle this restriction?
Seems like something in need of best-practice advice

> Roping in the MDN development team for their thoughts. What if we
> allowed demo authors to submit the URL of some webpage to the Derby, and
> then frame that webpage as we have been framing other demos? The only
> challenge with this approach is making sure authors don't edit their
> demos after the deadline.

The other challenge is that the demos can go away altogether. The main
point of uploads is that we take care of the hosting, can archive the
demos and provide source downloads, and can keep them online as long as
the Demo Studio stays online.

-- lorc...@mozilla.com http://lmorchard.com {web,mad,computer} scientist

[Bill Walker]

I believe we could also address the origin restriction by setting up a sequence of names such as <subdomainname>.developer.mozilla.org?

On Mar 26, 2012, at 6:02 PM, John Karahalis wrote:

> Trying again with "Reply All". Apparently "Reply List" drops people.
>
> --
>
> Awesome! Thanks for the offer, Joe!
>
> I would estimate about 20-40 submissions.
>
> On 03/26/2012 08:58 PM, Joe Stagner wrote:
>> How many entrants do you think we'd get.
>>
>> I could host them on one of my servers if we place some restrictions on server functionality (PHP, NoSQL etc)
>>
>> Joe
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "John Karahalis"<jkara...@mozilla.com>
>> To: "Janet Swisher"<jswi...@mozilla.com>
>> Cc: "Mike Morgan"<morg...@mozilla.com>, "Ron Piovesan"<rpio...@mozilla.com>, ap...@mozilla.com, dev...@lists.mozilla.org
>> Sent: Monday, March 26, 2012 8:41:23 PM
>> Subject: Re: Contest for cool apps
>>

>> This is an interesting problem. I didn't realize that Open Web Apps
>> allowed only one manifest per domain.
>>

>> Roping in the MDN development team for their thoughts. What if we
>> allowed demo authors to submit the URL of some webpage to the Derby, and
>> then frame that webpage as we have been framing other demos? The only
>> challenge with this approach is making sure authors don't edit their
>> demos after the deadline.
>>

[Justin Scott]

Is there a reason we need to host the apps ourselves? I can understand hosting demos ourselves, but if we expect folks to create cool apps, they probably want to hold onto them and need to manage the server-side aspects themselves.

I'd recommend having submission be:
1. Submit your app to the Marketplace
2. Give us its Marketplace URL to enter the contest

Justin

[Joe Stagner]

Thanks would be preferable.

-Joe

----- Original Message -----

From: "Justin Scott" <fli...@mozilla.com>
To: "Bill Walker" <bwa...@mozilla.com>
Cc: "John Karahalis" <jkara...@mozilla.com>, "Joe Stagner" <jsta...@mozilla.com>, "Mike Morgan" <morg...@mozilla.com>, "Ron Piovesan" <rpio...@mozilla.com>, ap...@mozilla.com, dev...@lists.mozilla.org, "Janet Swisher" <jswi...@mozilla.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2012 1:56:01 PM
Subject: Re: Contest for cool apps

Is there a reason we need to host the apps ourselves? I can understand hosting demos ourselves, but if we expect folks to create cool apps, they probably want to hold onto them and need to manage the server-side aspects themselves.

I'd recommend having submission be:
1. Submit your app to the Marketplace
2. Give us its Marketplace URL to enter the contest

Justin

Bill Walker wrote:

I believe we could also address the origin restriction by setting up a sequence of names such as <subdomainname>.developer.mozilla.org?



On Mar 26, 2012, at 6:02 PM, John Karahalis wrote:

<blockquote>

Trying again with "Reply All". Apparently "Reply List" drops people.

--

Awesome! Thanks for the offer, Joe!

I would estimate about 20-40 submissions.

On 03/26/2012 08:58 PM, Joe Stagner wrote:

<blockquote>

How many entrants do you think we'd get.

<blockquote>


</blockquote>

<blockquote>

I could host them on one of my servers if we place some restrictions on server functionality (PHP, NoSQL etc)

</blockquote>

<blockquote>


</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Joe

</blockquote>

<blockquote>


</blockquote>

<blockquote>
----- Original Message -----

</blockquote>

<blockquote>
From: "John Karahalis"< jkara...@mozilla.com >

</blockquote>

<blockquote>
To: "Janet Swisher"< jswi...@mozilla.com >

</blockquote>

<blockquote>

Cc: "Mike Morgan"< morg...@mozilla.com >, "Ron Piovesan"< rpio...@mozilla.com >, ap...@mozilla.com , dev...@lists.mozilla.org

</blockquote>

<blockquote>

Sent: Monday, March 26, 2012 8:41:23 PM

</blockquote>

<blockquote>

Subject: Re: Contest for cool apps

</blockquote>

<blockquote>


</blockquote>

<blockquote>

This is an interesting problem. I didn't realize that Open Web Apps

</blockquote>

<blockquote>

allowed only one manifest per domain.

</blockquote>

<blockquote>


</blockquote>

<blockquote>

Roping in the MDN development team for their thoughts. What if we

</blockquote>

<blockquote>

allowed demo authors to submit the URL of some webpage to the Derby, and

</blockquote>

<blockquote>

then frame that webpage as we have been framing other demos? The only

</blockquote>

<blockquote>

challenge with this approach is making sure authors don't edit their

</blockquote>

<blockquote>
demos after the deadline.

</blockquote>

<blockquote>


</blockquote>

<blockquote>

On 03/26/2012 12:05 PM, Janet Swisher wrote:

</blockquote>

<blockquote>

<blockquote>

cc'ing John Karahalis, who manages the Dev Derby.

</blockquote>

</blockquote>

<blockquote>

<blockquote>


</blockquote>

</blockquote>

<blockquote>

<blockquote>

We've had some discussions in Developer Engagement about having a month

</blockquote>

</blockquote>

<blockquote>

<blockquote>

with open web apps as the Dev Derby theme. One issue is that normally,

</blockquote>

</blockquote>

<blockquote>

<blockquote>

demos are hosted on dev.m.o, which means that under the current setup,

</blockquote>

</blockquote>

<blockquote>

<blockquote>

there could be only one app manifest on the site. We're going to have to

</blockquote>

</blockquote>

<blockquote>

<blockquote>

support externally-hosted demos in a couple of months when we do

</blockquote>

</blockquote>

<blockquote>

<blockquote>

WebSockets, but I'm not sure of the details.

</blockquote>

</blockquote>

<blockquote>


</blockquote>

</blockquote>


</blockquote>

[Les Orchard]

On 3/27/12 1:56 PM, Justin Scott wrote:
> Is there a reason we need to host the apps ourselves? I can understand
> hosting demos ourselves, but if we expect folks to create cool apps,
> they probably want to hold onto them and need to manage the server-side
> aspects themselves.
>
> I'd recommend having submission be:
> 1. Submit your app to the Marketplace
> 2. Give us its Marketplace URL to enter the contest

If they're demos that are also apps, we'd like to host them. We try to
ensure demos stay available, have downloadable source, etc.

If we're just soliciting cool apps, that's probably a different effort
than Demo Studio.

[Yvan Boily]

Is there a pressing need to host these on *.mozilla.org? If we do, then
it means having the security team review 20-40 submissions. It would
bring us a little peace of mind if we hosted this on a less critical
domain (for the demos). Maybe we can negotiate with one of the cloud
providers to give app contributors some cheap / free space (over and
above stuff that is already available?), or cover the costs for a period
of time for demo apps that are open source?

[Les Orchard]

On 3/27/12 2:10 PM, Yvan Boily wrote:
> Is there a pressing need to host these on *.mozilla.org? If we do, then
> it means having the security team review 20-40 submissions. It would
> bring us a little peace of mind if we hosted this on a less critical
> domain (for the demos).

They're already hosted there, and there are about 250 already. We have
this IT bug open to move demos to another domain:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664724

> Maybe we can negotiate with one of the cloud
> providers to give app contributors some cheap / free space (over and
> above stuff that is already available?), or cover the costs for a period
> of time for demo apps that are open source?

It's not an issue of the storage, it's a matter of getting the right
people together to complete the move. Moving to a cloud storage provider
will probably complicate things more

[Yvan Boily]

The reason I suggested a 3rd party to host them was less to do with
storage and more to do with us hosting 3rd party apps that will require
maintenance, and if they are hosted on Mozilla.org or Mozilla owned
domains, will likely need security reviews. For apps with no server
component this is less of a concern as it relegates the risk to client
side attacks such as reflected or DOM xss, or malicious content that
*might* get caught by the upload analyzer, but it is still a concern.

[Les Orchard]

On 3/27/12 2:22 PM, Yvan Boily wrote:
> The reason I suggested a 3rd party to host them was less to do with
> storage and more to do with us hosting 3rd party apps that will require
> maintenance, and if they are hosted on Mozilla.org or Mozilla owned
> domains, will likely need security reviews. For apps with no server
> component this is less of a concern as it relegates the risk to client
> side attacks such as reflected or DOM xss, or malicious content that
> *might* get caught by the upload analyzer, but it is still a concern.

No demos have server components hosted by Mozilla. At least, not so far.

We're tossing around ideas for websocket demos that will require server
components (bug 735897). Mozilla hosting for that is unlikely except
possibly for the winners of Dev Derbies and/or featured demos.

We're definitely not looking at providing a general infrastructure to
allow demo authors to upload server-side code. That *would* be handled
better by 3rd party cloud hosts.

[Havi Hoffman]

In late 2011 I think David Ascher was starting a project called Petri to address some of the issues raised on this thread: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Petri

Wondering if there's any new status on this...

----- Original Message -----
From: "Les Orchard" <lorc...@mozilla.com>
To: "Yvan Boily" <ybo...@mozilla.com>
Cc: "Justin Scott" <fli...@mozilla.com>, "Bill Walker" <bwa...@mozilla.com>, "Janet Swisher" <jswi...@mozilla.com>, "Ron Piovesan" <rpio...@mozilla.com>, "Mike Morgan" <morg...@mozilla.com>, ap...@mozilla.com, "John Karahalis" <jkara...@mozilla.com>, dev...@lists.mozilla.org, "Joe Stagner" <jsta...@mozilla.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2012 2:29:03 PM
Subject: Re: Contest for cool apps

[John Karahalis]

> I suppose we could try to put together something using per-demo
subdomains and a DNS wildcard entry like deviantart.com does per-user,
but that sounds... troublesome.

+1: Troublesome, but the easiest option I can think of.

On 03/26/2012 09:29 PM, Les Orchard wrote:
> I suppose we could try to put together something using per-demo
> subdomains and a DNS wildcard entry like deviantart.com does per-user,
> but that sounds... troublesome.

[John Karahalis]

Replying in bulk...

First, we will not be able to run this Derby until June at the earliest,
since we already announced technology themes for April and May. It's an
unfortunate delay, but some people have already started working on
submissions for April and May.

We are announcing the planned June theme on Sunday, so if we want this
to be the new June theme, please let me know as soon as possible.

> I believe we could also address the origin restriction by setting up
> a sequence of names such as <subdomainname>.developer.mozilla.org?

Les mentioned this possibility. He mentioned that it may be a bit
troublesome, but he is probably the better person to speak to that.

> I'd recommend having submission be:
> 1. Submit your app to the Marketplace
> 2. Give us its Marketplace URL to enter the contest

One potential issue with this is versioning. On the Dev Derby, we do not
allow people to update their demos after the deadline. Does the
Marketplace indicate when an app was last updated or (better yet) allow
people to link to specific versions of Apps.

Additionally, as Les mentioned, we prefer to host demos on the Derby
itself for various reasons. This is not critical IMHO, so if everyone
else is ok with it I think the Marketplace could work.

> Is there a pressing need to host these on *.mozilla.org? If we do,
then it means having the security team review 20-40 submissions.

Would having a demos.developer.mozilla.org domain solve this? If so,
maybe we can get that done before June.

[Andy McKay]

On 27/03/2012, at 7:37 PM, John Karahalis wrote:
> One potential issue with this is versioning. On the Dev Derby, we do not allow people to update their demos after the deadline. Does the Marketplace indicate when an app was last updated or (better yet) allow people to link to specific versions of Apps.

No. The marketplace only has a link to the manifest, we have no record of the code in the app or history about when they change. We can detect app manifest file changes, but that won't help in this scenario.

[Les Orchard]

On 3/27/12 10:37 PM, John Karahalis wrote:
...

> > I believe we could also address the origin restriction by setting up
> > a sequence of names such as <subdomainname>.developer.mozilla.org?
>
> Les mentioned this possibility. He mentioned that it may be a bit
> troublesome, but he is probably the better person to speak to that.

Troublesome, to the point that I doubt we'd have the infrastructure
ready in time for June. At least, not with all the other pieces we have
in the air right now. So, if we want to host App Manifests for demos, I
don't think this would work for June.

> > I'd recommend having submission be:
> > 1. Submit your app to the Marketplace
> > 2. Give us its Marketplace URL to enter the contest
>

> One potential issue with this is versioning. On the Dev Derby, we do not
> allow people to update their demos after the deadline. Does the
> Marketplace indicate when an app was last updated or (better yet) allow
> people to link to specific versions of Apps.

FWIW, this would also take some rethinking and reworking of the Demo
Studio itself to accommodate non-hosted demos. More stuff that might be
troublesome in time for June.

> Additionally, as Les mentioned, we prefer to host demos on the Derby
> itself for various reasons. This is not critical IMHO, so if everyone
> else is ok with it I think the Marketplace could work.

That's where I said that this might be a different effort. Are we hoping
to get technology demos worth dissecting, or useful apps worth installing?

It's not impossible to get both, but it might be easier to get good tech
demos. I'm not sure if we want to actively encourage those in the
Marketplace, though.

> > Is there a pressing need to host these on *.mozilla.org? If we do,
> then it means having the security team review 20-40 submissions.
>
> Would having a demos.developer.mozilla.org domain solve this? If so,
> maybe we can get that done before June.

We have a bug to move demo assets to another domain, but that's pending
free time from IT.

But, I think the more important issue was whether and where we might
host server-side components for demos (ie. for websockets). And I think
the answer to that issue was, generally we won't host server-side
components to demos.

[John Karahalis]

Sounds like we have two possibilities at the moment:

* Host a Web Apps Derby, but not until July. With everything we have on
our plates already (Kuma, subdomain, websockets infrastructure), I
would even put a "most likely" date at around August.
* Promote Web Apps in a different effort. Certainly not the ideal
solution, but it might be the best balance between usefulness and
timeliness.

[Luke Crouch]

I vote for the latter. MDN demo studio is a learning and evangelism
resource for *open web* technology more than a showcase for Mozilla
technologies. Inasmuch as web apps promote HTML5, CSS3, and other
cross-platform technology they would make good derby material. But
marketplace apps can be packaged as a demo for that.

To do a Mozilla-specific derby just doesn't seem to fit - it also
undermines our efforts to promote MDN as the cross-platform,
vendor-neutral open web destination.

So I'd say we should run the contest right on marketplace.mozilla.org,
but I think John would be a great resource to use for how to coordinate it.

-L

[John Karahalis]

Very well said. I agree across the board.

If we do end up hosting this contest on Marketplace, I would love to
help promote it.