The end of orbited?

[desmaj]

Hi Everyone,

For those of you that don't know me, I'm (supposedly) the current Orbited maintainer. I haven't done much with Orbited for a couple of years now. This is mostly due to a lack of time, but also because I've become less of a believer in the Orbited approach. I'll explain:

If you're reading this, you probably know that the plan with Orbited is to put a TCP socket (-like thing) in the browser. It turns out that this may not be a great idea. Can you think of a use case in which you would give your web user uncontrolled access to a TCP socket connected to some part of your architecture? I can't. That's what you're doing when you run Orbited.

So where do we go from here? I'm not sure. Unless someone can come up with a use case for Orbited that doesn't pose a security threat, I'm going to consider Orbited a dead project and it will start to go away.

Thanks to everyone here that's paid attention to, and used, orbited over the years. It's been fun.

Thanks,

Matthew Desmarais

P.S. If you can come up with that Orbited use case, let me know. I'd love to keep Orbited alive.

[bird sky]

what a bad news here!

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[Andrew Gryaznov]

Hi!

I think I have a use case for in-browser tcp. It is very experimental
and scientific though but I've been experimenting with it for several
years now. It is a browser-based operating system (a full-blown
in-browser OS).
I have a working prototype (rather hard to set up yet) -
http://doc.jeneric.net/index.php/Main_Page

The full-blown OS means it can run secure, isolated portions of
javascript code inside a single web page - with IPC, process
scheduling, sync and async calls and I/O, etc.. And of course, it
needs tcp! As you are probably running it on your own machine - you
will not run in to an 'allowing your user full access to tcp'
situation. The case I call a 'fully-ditributed web' - like that guys
from 'diaspora' social net project were talking about.

I have failed to attract attention to my jeneric project though and it
has been stalled for more than a year now but I'm still very excited
with it and I am still considering a continuation!

In any case, I thank you for your effort on orbited!

--
Andrew

[Michael]

It looks like Orbited has indeed become much less relevant over the last few years, since all modern browsers today have built-in support of Websocket[1], which offers pretty much the same thing Orbited did back in the day, but in more straightforward way and without additional javascripts. 

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket

Michael

[Rishav Rastogi]

Having put orbited in several projects over the years. This is very sad news. 

I agree with Andrew, as such, there is always some scope.

Thanks for all your work and all the best. 

Rishav 

Rishav Rastogi
http://twitter.com/rishavrastogi
Cell : +91 9676086910
Gtalk : rishav.rastogi
Skype : rishavrastogi

[Philip Bennefall]

Hello there,

 

For my own part, I feel that any competent sockets programmer should be able to write code that is robust enough to handle traffic from any source. Whether this endpoint is accessible from the web, a standalone piece of software etc really doesn't make much of a difference. Therefore, I definitely consider Orbited to be as useful as it ever was, even with the new standard maturing. We're certainly not in a situation yet where the standard has been adopted reliably everywhere, so Orbited still fills a function as a bridge for cross browser compatibility. The security concern is there with any socket driven application, regardless of where the traffic may potentially come from. As soon as you open your application up to the outside world, you have to be aware of these pitfalls and protect against them (Orbited or no Orbited). Just my two cents.

 

Kind regards,

 

Philip Bennefall

----- Original Message -----

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[desmaj]

Hi folks,

Thanks for making your opinions known! It's great to see that there are still enough people out there interested enough to stand up for Orbited.

The point has been made to me by more than one person that the problems of securing a public-facing network service don't belong to Orbited. So I'm going to spend a little more time on it than I have. I might even get around to making a new release; it's been a while.

Orbited lives!

Thanks,

Matthew

[Andrew Gryaznov]

Wow! That's great news!
I hope that we will together draw more attention to what can be done
in javascript!

Another thought that I had thinking of orbited: TCP processing in
javascript might be the most secure way of doing networking in
high-level language! Folks at browsers side have made a lot more
progress in developing a secure and fast interpreter than guys of,
say, Java or python.