SAFEpress Status Update: 2016 May

[happybeing]

13th May 2016

Its been a busy time and so little to report until now, but at last I have some time to spend and have been busy hooray! I've been exploring both the SAFE API and playing with the code in the MaidSafe demo app and SAFE Launcher, and scratching my head for ideas for how to bootstrap SAFEpress.

So I decided to build something useful as a way to brush up my skills and learn how to use the SAFE API.

My interim goal is to create a backend for a web API backend called remoteStorage.js, so that any app built for this will be able to use SAFE Network to host application data - without the app developer ever needing to know anything about SAFE Network or write any extra code to use it. This will be a very useful feature in itself: a foundation on which to build powerful cross platform web apps, with offline-first support built in, not just a useful step towards building SAFEpress.

Offline-first means the application can work without an internet connection and synchronises with your online data when you next go online. remoteStorage.js has built in offline-first capability, and gives users control over where their data is stored, including with any hosting service or server that supports the remoteStorage API

By extending remoteStorage.js to use SAFE Network for data storage, any remoteStorage.js web app will automatically be a SAFE Network web app too. From there it will not be hard to begin building first a file based CMS, and then begin to extend this by adding a built in editor and so on, website templates, and so on until a full SAFEpress Web CMS is born.

Today I completed the first stage in the SAFE API / remoteStorage.js investigation: building a dummy remoteStorage.js backend for SAFE API which is effectively a copy of another backend ready to be converted to use the SAFE Launcher API. Here's the branch for remoteStorage.js and the My Favourite Drinks demo app, which for now just displays a crude SAFE Network icon next to the other backend options (Dropbox and GoogleDrive).