OT: No More Servers

[David Bovill]

Is anyone on this list interested in topics of decentralised architecture?
I've a long standing interest in them, and there are some very interesting
new tools that I feel are of deep relevance to Livecode and the Livecode
community.

A decentralised architecture is one without servers - communication is P2P.
Federated architectures are also interesting, and a mix of both is even
better.

There are a number of advantages for the Livecode community:

   - Stacks and assets are served without a central server
   - No centralised bandwidth and hosting costs
   - No classical denai-of-service attack issues
   - New non-web tool chains posible
   - New authentication and security models

The last two are interesting. Classic web client-server architectures are
very mature on other platforms. A huge amount of this infrastructure is
involved in scaling, and managing users. So web servers, caching, proxies,
user management, sessions, authentication etc

If you take a close look at code bases of major projects, a great deal of
it is taken up by managing this basic stuff, and surprisingly little on the
actual application. All these areas are also the very areas that Livecode
is weakest on. We don't have oAuth libraries, robust servers and so on. So
we tend to play in this environment as second class citizens.

With P2P architectures this is different. Stacks and files are simply
served by the architecture in a scalable way. Session and user management
is often completely different, often using public key infrastructure, and
sometimes taken care for you by the platform itself.

Another thing makes it of particular interest to Livecode. Many of these
architectures are no scripted in python / ruby / php etc. They are in C/C++
or Go. Livecode plays much better with these low level languages. LCB will
allow us to extend Livecode to be a full integrated citizen in these
architectures.

If anyone is interested in exploring this area - I'm starting a *research
group* looking into using Livecode in decentralised environments. I'm going
to start weekly Hangouts and make recordings - much like the Livecode TV
sessions I started a few years back - but with a bit different technology.

Hangout this Sunday anyone?