State of Beaker, Feb 2017

[Paul Frazee]

Hello everyone,

We've been a bit quiet lately, so I wanted to give a short update on what all is happening.

Bug squashing in the Dat protocol

This is the main reason you haven't heard about new releases. While we've kept developing tools, there have been blocker bugs in the Dat protocol which we had to squash before releasing anything new. These are now resolved.

New tool development

We've been improving on the tooling around Beaker. We're going to release these new tools and updates this week. They are:

• Dathttpd, a server for hosting over dat and https
  
• A much improved bkr command line tool

DNS support

The next version of Beaker (and bkr) will include dns shortname support. For example, you can load dat://www.datprotocol.com on the current master branch. You'll also be able to `bkr clone dat://www.datprotocol.com`. Dathttpd will make it easy to use DNS.

Beaker improvements

As usual we've been making lots of progress on Beaker itself, with a lot of bugfixes and a new start page.

What's next?

Expect a release this week with everything I've listed here.

Our next focus will be on improving the Beaker applications model. We're going to give some attention to the APIs (here's a rough draft of the new APIs) and we're going to add the app scheme. Our goal is to move almost everything, including most of Beaker's currently builtin pages, into userland.

We've been documenting our plans for the "Thick" applications model in various places, if you want to learn more:

• About the Thick applications architecure
• A chat about the Beaker apps model

Also, fair warning, there's going to be a big set of changes in the next version of Dat which will do amazing things for performance, but may not be backwards compatible. We'll keep you updated.

-prf

[Michael Sullivan]

Amazing work!