Dossy Shiobara wrote:
Back in Feburary 2005, Dan Chak at MIT said something to me that I just
haven't had the motivation to pursue. However, I really would like to
hear what folks think of his statement:
> What AOLServer "community" needs is a bunch of fun, free
> applications for building personal sites. It's stupid, but
> that's how you get the initial hook on people. I'm not sure who
> is going to make and release these "fun, free apps" though,
> because there's currently also no audience for it. It's kind of
> a bootstrapping problem.
It's definitely a chicken-and-egg problem: most newbies won't try
AOLserver "for the heck of it" but would go through the trouble if there
was an application they wanted to run, i.e. OpenACS.
Of course, there's little motivation to develop a fun, free app. for
AOLserver if nobody's going to try it out.
How do we break out of this deadlock?
Fun Free apps.
The hottest fun free apps currently are mashups and social networking
things. And all the data providers (i.e., facebook, flickr, twitter,
etc) have php and java client libraries (and occasionally a few others).
I don't think any of them have aoslerver/tcl libraries. That is
needed as an entrypoint.
One starting point I'd be willing to help on here is an openid client
(since I've already started work on it).
The more traditional personal apps - news/content pages, blog/message
board, etc - are still useful too. (and would be a reason for having an
openid server also :) Prior to Dossy's call to action on this, I was
thinking about starting just such a project for my own use (under the
working name ASblog - A Simple blog, or AolServer blog, then expanding
it to A Simple Site, but ASS site doesn't seem so catchy). OpenACS is
out there; it's a great system but it's a big system, not really the
ideal introduction.
There's another problem too - "free". Or at least, cheap. Not
aolserver or the apps themselves, but a place to run them. There are
lots of places where you can get php hosting for $5 a month (which
includes a bunch of stuff preinstalled, email, etc...). If you want to
host aolserver, the cheapest option I'm aware of is an unmanaged linux
vps for around $15/mo and *then* you need to set up everything yourself.
(and depending on the vps you might have memory issues) I guess this is
just part of that chicken and egg problem. Maybe just call it /bin/sh
(the "shell" of the egg... get it?)
Somewhat related to this last point is my current interest (and
frustration) in helping out small non-profits. I'd like to help out
some local groups (preschools, clubs) set up websites for things like
fund-raising, school supplies wishlists, news, and so forth; I'd like
to use the best technology available as a foundation (imho, aolserver
meets that criteria) but the hosting costs make it unattractive - the
difference between $60 a year and $180 a year (labor costs are donated
of course) is significant at this level. (I vaguely recall a story of
Philip Greenspun pitching aolserver/acs to some nonprofit with zero
software cost being a big selling point and being rebuffed because in
their multi-million dollar budget was already allocated plenty for
building completely new systems from scratch. This is a different
league I'm talking about. The entire IT budget is maybe a few hundred
dollars and most of that probably goes for printer ink.)
Which brings me back to something I've mentioned before, shared hosting.
AOLserver can do virtual hosts, but a little more framework would be
needed to realistically serve multiple independent sites from a single
installation. Nothing huge or insurmountable, just some isolation
between separate servers so someone doesn't accidentally (or
maliciously) overwrite someone else's data. Two quickies come to mind:
'ns_db gethandle' should not be able to get a handle from a different
virtual server (I don't know if it can now), and there should be a way
to run a safe interpreter and pass commands like 'open' to a setuid
ns_proxy. The 3.x era nsvhr/nsunix modules let you run an entire server
as a different user, but that would be even more memory-prohibitive.
(Before someone says "just use apache, it does all this well" my point
is that I don't want to use apache, I want to use aolserver because it's
better for applications, and if it's worse for addressable
practicalities when I'd like to address those practicalities and make it
better.)
-J
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