Welcome, newcomers!

[Michiel de Jong]

It seems that as people are returning to work after the holidays, a lot of people heard about unhosted for the first time. Today, many people tweeted about us, we were a topic on HackerNews again, and a lot of people joined the mailing list. Great!

We are now more than 100 people. :)

So welcome, newcomers! Let me try to explain a little bit what you missed so far, then we're all more or less on the same page (other people, please feel free to correct me if I'm skipping important things). There are a few 'getting started' links on our wiki, here: https://github.com/michiel-unhosted/unhosted/wiki/Getting-Started if you have any questions about what unhosted is or how it works, you can start there. And if you're ready to get your hands dirty, then you're in the right place! Basically, we have various things that need doing right now. We need help especially with the last one in the list ('develop unhosted web apps'):

1 - vote for the HackyHolidays competition. The contestants are listed here: http://www.unhosted.org/HackyHolidays.html

2 - think about the Unhosted protocol. This is the protocol by which the browser can talk to the unhosted node. The main discussion right now is whether or not (and how) it should be extensible. You can read the discussion thread about this here: https://groups.google.com/group/unhosted/browse_thread/thread/26177e954a5c061f?hl=en

3 - develop unhosted storage nodes. There are currently 4 projects: one in node.js, one in python, one in perl, and one in php. So that's the area where we're best covered at the moment. See https://groups.google.com/group/unhosted/browse_thread/thread/26177e954a5c061f?hl=en

4 - develop the first client-side library (more competing ones can be added later, let's start with one). Actually, I've lost track a little bit of how this is progressing; Daniel, can you give us an update? Can people help at this point? When can we start porting existing apps to the new library?

5 - Develop Unhosted Web Apps - this is the most important field where we need JavaScript ninjas to jump in right now. Here is a list of existing ones: https://github.com/michiel-unhosted/unhosted/wiki/List-of-Unhosted-Web-Apps-we-know-about

Cheers!

Michiel

[Daniel Gröber]

From: Michiel de Jong <mic...@unhosted.org>
Subject: [unhosted] Welcome, newcomers!
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2011 12:55:38 +0800

> 4 - develop the first client-side library (more competing ones can be added
> later, let's start with one). Actually, I've lost track a little bit of how
> this is progressing; Daniel, can you give us an update? Can people help at
> this point? When can we start porting existing apps to the new library?

Well the new version of the lib is not usable yet. I am somewhat done with the
crypto code refactoring. The switch to CommonJS Modules/AsynchronousDefinition
is also done for all the libs. I hope to get the basics of the main lib sorted
out soon but I haven't made much progress in the last few days because I am
constantly having this feeling that stuff is wrong with the way we currently do
things (user identification etc.). So I spent quite some time researching how we
could integrate OpenID, WebFinger etc.

Help is always appreciated ;) If anybody wants to help getting the main API
cleaned up just catch me in irc, send me an email or whatever.