I think having a section off of the promo site (and linked from the wiki
too) to showcase simple user-created apps is a great idea as I have not
seen that concept on other sites.
I believe Magnus is building a TryCamping thing too which would be
awesome too.
I agree with the fact that making it easier for kids/teens to play with
Camping would be fantastic.
I am not sure exactly how to make that happen but you are onto something
with monkey patching part of Ruby too make it safer / easier to do that.
/!\ warning - stream of consciousness coming up ...
How about if we used a key-value store (like
CouchDB/MongoDB/TokyoCabinet/...) as an application repository? Here is
a potential scenario assuming a Camping "enthusiast" already has an app
working locally on their box:
1-Enthusiast chooses to create an app in the "CampingGround" / sandbox
2-We create a definition for the app as well as a source file based
on an minimal template
3-We store both in the key-value db
4-We mount the app and wire the reloader to look for timestamp
changes on the key-value store record
5-Enthusiast uploads the code - saves commit the code changes to the
key-value store
6-Enthusiast runs the mounted app
Maybe we could convince a host like Heroku to facilitate this.
Is this crazy? Any other ideas?
-Philippe
On 7/13/2010 8:49 PM, Jenna Fox wrote:
Another passing thought: It'd be very much in the spirit of freeform
fun little hacks if the camping website included a section of user
created apps. They would need to be moderated somehow, unless someone
were to set up a try-rubyish highly sandboxed environment to run them.
It just seems like there'd be no better way to show what Camping is
all about than to have it's very own website full of fun little
examples of camping apps, with a way to see the source code of each
right in there. If you guys had something like that, i'd love to
contribute some quirky little multiplayer games, and an extremely
simple chat thing. :)
What with rack mounts, this should be easy, right?
Why did say at art & code that he didn't really care if the code
editor part of HetyH was really good - what mattered was the sharing.
The forum. The code messaging system. The apps which could talk to
each other over the web through the various APIs. That was the
important part of hackety hack. I think that's the important part of
camping as well. The main reason I use Camping over Sinatra and the
likes is the way it feels so warm and fuzzy, and I know if I have any
troubles, I get to come talk to all you awesome people. :)
If we had the sandboxed thing, it'd be fairly trivial to include a
little cli app in the camping gem to upload the app in to a whyism or
hetyh or whatever account, where it could sit in a little bin of
recent uploads, and be attached to forum posts, or shared out like
tinyurls.
The most important part of all that is kids. Kids don't have web
servers. It's all well and good to have camping ourselves, but if
we're to think for one minute that we're helping kids learn ruby
(which after all, was _why's mission), we've got to be offering some
fairly easy way for them to host this stuff.
Does anyone know much about sandboxing? Anyone know if it'd be
particularly difficult to do things like monkeypatch the IO class to
effectively chroot and secure a camping app? Can we disable `system
calls` too? What's involved in making something like that viable?
Hosts like Dreamhost seem to already be making use of Passenger to
dynamically allocate ruby processes to apps, so they can be booted up
when requested and shut down after they idle for a minute. :)
—
Jenna Fox
http://creativepony.com/
_______________________________________________
Camping-list mailing list
[email protected]
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/camping-list
_______________________________________________
Camping-list mailing list
[email protected]
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/camping-list
