Friend2Friend - XML Programming of Secure, Decentralised, Networks

[elf Pavlik]

Hello,

I searched this group for Friend2Friend and it returned no results. I
would like to point anyone interested to this project. It leverages
power of XML in IMHO quite interesting way...

http://friend2friend.net

Homepage of its author:

http://www.robinupton.com

Hope some of you will find it interesting =)

[Kevin]

> Hope some of you will find it interesting =)

1. I certainly find it interesting.
2. Is there any other format besides XML? I want to check it out, but
XML? Arrrrgh...

[Kevin]

Incredible, been weeks since i've been to this group and then this! I
thank you, for posting this! ;)

[Robin Upton]

Hi Kevin,

I'm glad you find it interesting. Sorry, but there's no other format
besides XML :-(. I considered using RDF as a native datatype, but
decided that would just be too high level to be practical at this stage,
especially as it didn't have a natural scripting language, the way that
XML has XSL. It is possible that I've got XML on the brain due to so
much coding of this project :-), but it seems like the natural choice,
since:

1) Well defined, long established, W3C standard communication format
2) Many interesting vocabularies such as XHTML, RDF, FOAF, XSD, XSL etc.
already in XML or roll your own and intermingle

I've had minimal feedback about the project so far, perhaps because I've
done such a lousy job at publicising it, perhaps because people couldn't
get the code running (no thanks to the PHP guys for breaking it again
with the latest PHP version :-( ), or perhaps people did but they
couldn't make sense of it.

Compared to the effort I put in to design it, it doesn't actually do
much, since apart from lacking a good GUI standard, it is basically a
kernel without much in the way of libraries; there is minimal software
for it as yet. Even with a call stack and soft exception checking,
programming it take some getting used to - until the number of modules
available increases, that means coding XSL, which is not to everyone's
taste. It's also pretty abstract because, like XML, I've tried to make
it general enough for people to do what they want with it, including
running cron jobs or daemons on other friends' machines. The formula of
skinning other functions inside an XML wrapper, perhaps adding XSDs for
input or ouput is a simple one, and I look forward to meeting other
people at 27C3 working on related technologies, to see how much synergy
we can find with emerging technologies for identity/transport etc.

Robin Upton
http://friend2friend.net

[Robin Upton]

Thanks for the feedback, Jon,
I think you caught it mid update.
It should be easier to investigate further now.

Robin
> Hi Robin,
>
> I've just been to the site, and got:
>
> *Fatal error*: Cannot redeclare stopcompile() (previously declared in
> /home/bluefnord/friend2friend.net/hardcode/php/recompile-server.php:63) in *
> /home/bluefnord/friend2friend.net/hardcode/php/compile.php* on line *85*
>
> It makes it pretty hard to investigate it further :)
>
> All the best,
> --
> Jon "The Nice Guy" Spriggs
>

[Kevin]

> It is possible that I've got XML on the brain due to so
> much coding of this project :-), but it seems like the natural choice,
> since:

Well, I'm coming from code/sysadmin so it's not for me, I was groaning
like Sisyphus just now because I had to read an apple plist file :)
All my frontend friends will love it, they love all that stuff, and
they are the ones who will jump on it. It's a excellent, if verbose
data transfer format, I'll cheerfully send gigs of it over the wire
for others to read, and you are correct, only protocol buffers or
BJSON has a tight spec like XML.