Re: [Social-discuss] Languages -- let's make a web application

[Story Henry]

Btw, I am a Java programmer mostly, though I could of course develop in 
other languages - and am very tempted by Scala - but I would rather
concentrate on what I know well. So I will probably not be contributing 
code to this project.

This is not a problem at all in my opinion.

What I would love to do is to help other open source java applications
interact in a seamless way with gnu social does. And I think people
doing other languages should try to take some social app in their language 
of preference, and hack it so it can interact with gnu social too.

This is what we are doing on the foaf+ssl list. We have servers written in
php, python, java, and perl interacting at what is presently a basic level.

See:
  http://esw.w3.org/Foaf%2Bssl/IDP
  http://esw.w3.org/Foaf%2Bssl/RelyingParties

It would be great if we could add gnu social to the list.

It should not matter what language one uses. What is important is that
one publish the data restfully. 

Since any project has to start off making a language choice, gnu social 
taking php is perfectly good choice.

By starting in this very simple way, we will soon come to see
what new structures need to be developed, and we will then soon
also come to see how other protocols can play nicely together. The 
good thing is that these will become obvious as we go along.

Btw, XMPP is part of foaf. You can publish in your foaf profile
your jabber id,  and it just requires an application to know how 
to open a jabber application to allow people to communicate. Clearly 
if jabber apps could also read and publish foaf, then there would 
be integration of gnu social with jabber, which could then be integrated 
even further into the UI.

Same with the other p2p protocols mentioned here. 

We should see gnu social's choice of one language not as a limitation,
but as a call for other social apps to work to interact with it, and 
vice versa.

Henry


On 28 Mar 2010, at 19:44, Matt Lee wrote:

> I don't believe that a desktop application should be the initial focus
> of this.
> 
> This kind of application belongs in a browser right now, so people can
> access it from their phone, their office, their laptop, their iPad,
> whatever.
> 
> When we have GNU social up and running, and people are able to
> communicate between web clients, people will inevitably make desktop
> clients, and that's great... but it's not the focus here.
> 
> Let's move on from discussing which language is better, and move to
> discussing how we can get started making this a reality.
> 
> PHP and a relational database will allow more people use this in the
> ways that people use social networks now. That's reality.
> 
> Now please, let's pick a framework, and quickly, and start writing code.
>