Sunsetting freebaseapps.com

[Michael Masouras]

Given that freebaseapps.com has never reached critical mass and usage has only been declining the past few years, we can no longer justify the cost of developing and maintaining freebaseapps.com and the Acre platform.

When you also consider that Google already provides a more full-featured and robust app hosting option in App Engine -- which is also fully-compatible with the Freebase APIs -- our efforts are clearly better spent elsewhere.

As a result of all this, we have decided the freebaseapps.com environment will cease to function in 2014. 

In order to minimize inconvenience to those that still depend on this platform today, we want to execute the decommissioning in an orderly fashion, and have devised the following timeline:

January 13th 2014 - blackout 

We will cause traffic to *.freebaseapps.com to cease for 24 hours (with adequate warning in advance). This will allow those that still depend on the platform but have not received news about this to be alerted. We have made the best effort to contact all the authors of the apps that still receive traffic, but in many cases we were unable to communicate with them. We hope the artificial blackout will cause little inconvenience but grab enough attention to trigger a dialog with us on this plan.

February 3rd 2014 - appeditor read-only

Appeditor (http://www.freebase.com/appeditor) will no longer be able to modify your apps. You will still be able to browse apps and see source code, but you won’t be able to create new files, edit existing files or publish new versions of your apps. 

March 31st 2014 - shut-down 

We will shut-down the site completely on that date. All the URLs will redirect to a page that contains info about the shutdown and the apps will cease to function.

It is worth noting that Acre, the framework that powers these web applications has been open sourced at http://code.google.com/p/acre and can be run standalone on your own server or even in AppEngine directly. The source code of all the apps that were hosted in freebaseapps.com can be downloaded and executed independently in Acre (even Freebase.com itself is an Acre app running in AppEngine!) so even after the shutdown you will be able to continue running your freebase app if you wish to do so.

We apologize for any inconvenience this will cause but we believe we can serve the Freebase community better by increasing our focus on our core mission.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

The Freebase Team

[Spencer Kelly]

backend Js before it was a thing,
one-line oauth,

terminal-free version control,

collaborative packaging ecosystem,

browser-ide

the heroku, git, node, and brackets people are all still trying to catch up.

thanks for the sweet deal.

-spence

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[Jason Douglas]

Well said -- thank you, Spence.

I'm still a big believer in that vision of development... unfortunately, it's just too far afield of everything else we do to dedicate the necessary time and resources.  

Hopefully someone else will.  :)

-jason

[Omri Oren]

Hi Michael,

Does this mean that http://download.freebaseapps.com will also be unavailable? (It is the URL through which the Freebase dump is downloaded)

In that case, what would be the stable URL for downloading the Freebase dump?

Thanks,

Omri

[Jason Douglas]

On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 7:14 AM, Omri Oren <omri...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Michael,

Does this mean that http://download.freebaseapps.com will also be unavailable? (It is the URL through which the Freebase dump is downloaded)

In that case, what would be the stable URL for downloading the Freebase dump?

https://developers.google.com/freebase/data

 

[Dan]

That links back to http://download.freebaseapps.com on the download button...

[Michael Masouras]

I think that's a UI bug - you actually get to download the data dump if you click on that button. 

[Dan]

That button submits a form which is defined as

<form method="get" action="http://download.freebaseapps.com" target="_blank">

which redirects you to the common google storage which is where the dumps are.

So it appears this IS used for the redirection, and it's more and just a UI bug?

[Tom Morris]

But if you look at the app, it's a trivial piece of code that just uses that Google Storage APIs to figure out where the latest dump is.  It wouldn't be hard to do this in a different way.

Tom

[Dan]

I'm sure it's not that much work, but just pointing out something does need to be done.

[Jason Douglas]

Yup, these are all correct assessments of the situation.  :-)

[Michael Masouras]

As some of you might have noticed, we missed our blackout date of Jan 13th 2014. We have been discussing this schedule over the last weeks and we are making the following modifications:

February 6th 2014 - blackout

All traffic to *.freebaseapps.com will be blocked for 24h starting in the morning PST

There will be no read-only period for appeditor. It will be useful to keep appeditor editing open until the last minute, as this will facilitate small edits that will ease in the transition (e.g. adding a redirect). 

March 31st 2014 - shut-down 

freebaseapps.com will be shut-down. App source code will still be available  via the appeditor

The Freebase Team

[Michael Masouras]

A reminder that the freebasapps.com 24h blackout will start today. 

[Thad Guidry]

He meant freebaseapps.com ... not freebasapps.com

And to remind folks again... what / where will be the handling of the split tool ???

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-Thad

+ThadGuidry
Thad on LinkedIn

[Tom Morris]

I can still get to https://untyped.tfmorris.user.dev.freebaseapps.com/ 

Is that because the blackout hasn't started yet or is something else going on?

I'll second Thad's question about the the split tool (and the rest of the tools on the "expert hub").

Tom

[Tom Morris]

And to revive Dan's earlier point - the developer's page for the data dumps still points to download.freebaseapps.com.

For any OpenRefine users - there are some "helper apps" hosted on this service that will need to be replaced, but I haven't had a chance to look into the issue yet.

Tom

[Tom Morris]

On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Tom Morris <tfmo...@gmail.com> wrote:

I can still get to https://untyped.tfmorris.user.dev.freebaseapps.com/ 

Is that because the blackout hasn't started yet or is something else going on?

To answer my own question, this was apparently because the blackout hadn't started yet.  The URL did become unavailable later although the HTTPS URL reported an SSL protocol error and the HTTP URL was, I think, returning a 404, not the expected 410 Gone status.

Tom

[Michael Masouras]

Yes, that is a bug that we are fixing. The split tool will continue to operate after we shut down the service, but all other sites will go down. 

[Thad Guidry]

Michael,

What will be the split tool's URI then ?  same ? or a different one ? 

[Michael Masouras]

It will be the same - split.freebaseapps.com. 

[Michael Masouras]

A heads-up that the shut-down of freebaseapps.com is happening on Monday 3/31. 

If you have an app that absolutely must keep running, please contact us to discuss an orderly removal. 

The Freebase Team

[Michael Masouras]

This shut down is now complete, please let us know of unforeseen consequences. 

The Freebase Team

[James Weaver]

freebaseapps.com is still mentioned on the Apps tab of the Freebase site.

Regards,

James Weaver