71–80 of 138 posts
Anybody remember Groove Networks. Lotus notes over p2p then bought and killed by Microsoft?. It was pretty amazing for its time.
> By now, everyone knows that serverless doesn't actually mean without servers; it just means using someone else's servers. What? Is this some kind of confusing reference to lambda and competing providers? As far as I know most of computing is serverless.
Serverless products usually are charging by # of invocations or CPU times, whereas "server-full" products charge you a multiply of "# of servers".
These ideas are some of the founding principles of "local-first software": https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ As I like to put it - Local-first is the real serverless. Your user's device is the real edge. I think the future of the web needs to be that the server is optional, we need our data (albeit personal or our companies) to be on our own devices. We are all carrying around these massively powerful devices…
Clarification: I'm not the author of the linked post. I read your post some time back and feel it's been an organizing force for developers in this space — great job and thanks for the work you put into it. I often wonder about terminology. What was the reason you chose "local-first" over "offline-first" (or even "serverfree" as in this case)?
I also (personally) don't like "serverfree" because servers are good - they're not the problem! It's the "servers you don't and can't control" cloud dependencies that are the issue.
Like, just … a program?
Right. This whole thing reminds me of that one "men will do literally anything rather than go to therapy" meme, except it's "developers will do literally anything rather than make a desktop app". And yes, I read the author's disclaimer about how this isn't just a desktop app, and no, I'm not persuaded that this is filling a need desktop apps didn't already fill.
> By now, everyone knows that serverless doesn't actually mean without servers; it just means using someone else's servers. What? Is this some kind of confusing reference to lambda and competing providers? As far as I know most of computing is serverless.
This usually refers to the billing model of the computation. Serverless products usually are charging by # of invocations or CPU times, whereas "server-full" products charge you a multiply of "# of servers".
Or something like bisq (https://bisq.network) when the program runs locally peer to peer and hosts all user data locally, but still pings oracle servers for outside market price data?
I go to fairly great lengths to do everything in the browser to avoid having to support any backends (for the tools, etc. I make; & hobby project gamedev). It would be a great thing if (perhaps legislation) could break the app-store model, then fully-fledged apps could be distributed as web sites (with their own localstorage, etc.) I wonder if there's some legal way of saying, "the web is critical communication infra…
Offline-first isn't enough. I've done user support with users in the mountains who don't have a reliable internet connection. Being able to say 'don't worry, the app works offline, you can (optionally) sync when you're next in the city' is extremely rewarding, and vital for software to work for these people. ---- Offline-only is not enough either. Ideally users should be able to sync between devices when offline, and…
These ideas are some of the founding principles of "local-first software": https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/ As I like to put it - Local-first is the real serverless. Your user's device is the real edge. I think the future of the web needs to be that the server is optional, we need our data (albeit personal or our companies) to be on our own devices. We are all carrying around these massively powerful devices…
The thing that always bothered me about that article is:
> Notably, the object server is open source and self-hostable, which reduces the risk of being locked in to a service that might one day disappear.
It appears that the object server is neither open source and nor self-hostable. The repository that they link is mostly empty. It has a rich version history of "releases" that only change the changelog file.
I assume the article was accurate when written, and have always wondered what happened. So I suspect mongo rewrote the git history to remove the code when they bought Realm. Was it ever open source? Did they intimidate people into taking down forks or did nobody bother?
I do see an edit to the README around that time adding that a license is required to run the self-hosted server. It is dated about two months before the linked article, but they may not have noticed or it may be back-dated:
https://github.com/realm/realm-object-server/commit/fc0b399d...