unhosted web apps in 2014 (overview post with lots of links!)

[Michiel B. de Jong]

heyo,

I just realized we haven't been posting much to this mailing list, so
here's a small update! With lots of links to further reading :)

With noBackend [1] and Offline First [2] picking up quite some
publicity, the idea of unhosted web apps is starting to become more and
more part of established mainstream in JavaScript land.

Important tools like remoteStorage [3], sockethub [4], 5apps [5],
PouchDB [6], Hoodie [7], NimbusBase [8] and the Firefox OS DataStore [9]
are now getting to a point where it is possible to build data-driven
apps on the client-side, the unhosted way.

People are also experimenting more and more with peer-to-peer data
exchange over WebRTC - keep an eye on GrimWire [10], PeerJS [11],
webtorrent [12], and probably others will pop up every now and then; if
they do then we'll tweet about it via @unhosted [13].

In the meantime, many of the people who were at Unhošť13 [14] and Hacker
Beach [15] are working on various experimental unhosted web apps, which
helps us to find the pain points in our early set of tools, so that we
can improve them.

For myself that mainly means this month i've been working on making
remotestorage.js better suitable for data sets of 1000+ items, through
better tree-based sync for remotestorage.js [16]. Thanks to the
Merkle-tree approach, it's possible to quickly check if a certain part
of your data (e.g. only your photos from August), is in sync. This is
useful because a remoteStorage-based app is likely to only be interested
in (and only have access to) a small part of a user's data. So our
approach there is different from PouchDB and DataStore, which both use a
sequential changes stream approach.

We're also planning to organize some meetups around unhosted web apps
this year, so stay tuned for that! And don't hesitate to post to this
mailing list if you have any questions about unhosted web apps, or want
to present something you've been hacking on and get feedback from other
unhosted web app developers.

At some point this year, i also plan to resume my unhosted adventures
blog [17] which i still left unfinished before last summer. I'm working
on a remoteStorage+sockethub-based social unhosted app, and when i have
that working, i'll write another bunch of blog posts about the lessons
learned from that, review some more tools and other topics, and if i
find the time, i'll edit the whole bundle into a CC-licensed book. All
of this research is still being paid from our donation grant [18] from
NLnet [19]. Without the sponsorship from NLnet, Wau Holland Stiftung
[20], and several hundred crowd-funding individuals, the world of
unhosted web apps would definitely not be where it is today!

Comments/replies (and especially additions!) very welcome. I wonder if
the number of links in this post will get it past the spam filters. :)


Cheers,
Michiel

[1] http://nobackend.org/
[2] http://offlinefirst.org/

[3] http://remotestorage.io/
[4] http://sockethub.org/
[5] http://5apps.com/
[6] http://pouchdb.com/
[7] http://hood.ie/
[8] http://nimbusbase.com/
[9] https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/DataStore

[10] https://grimwire.com/
[11] http://peerjs.com/
[12] http://webtorrent.io/

[13] https://twitter.com/unhosted
[14] https://unhosted.org/people/
[15] http://hackerbeach.org/

[16] https://github.com/remotestorage/remotestorage.js/pull/595
[17] https://unhosted.org/adventures/
[18] https://github.com/unhosted/u36/issues?state=open
[19] http://nlnet.nl/
[20] http://www.wauland.de/