On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 2:28 PM, ??? <chentianyi87 at gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > I am interested in A microblogging and/or real-time chat system of GSOC and > the description said that a fair amount of work on how to efficiently > implement microblogging over Freenet have been done. I am wordering that if > I want to join this project, I should build a independent use any technology > and framework I want such as Struts + Spring + Hibernate or I should > embedded the microblogging in to the Freenet code as the whole system. And I > think Freenet have had strong ability in file distribute so that add > real-time chat system is really easy for you because you only need to > connect others by knowing their IP address. Could give me a short > description about what is the objective of this project and what kind of > technology you really want? I am now builiding by own SNS website by using > Struts + Spring + Hibernate and Ajax and have some experience about file > download software with multithreading control. Could you tell me what is the > most different between this project and my provious projects? > > By the way, do I need to design the entity, relationship and attribute for > database by meself? What database you use? (I have MySQL and Oracle 10g > experience)?
I'll let someone else speak to the gsoc issues; here's a brief summary of the technical problems. The first thing to realize about any sort of microblogging or chat application on Freenet is that it will be *very* different from a normal web app on the back end. (The UI end can and should be as similar as possible, though.) First, there is no central server to talk to. It's *completely* peer to peer. Second, there's a spam problem: globally writable namespaces don't work. And third, the raw operations Freenet provides (insert and fetch, but not update or directory listing equivalents) are somewhat awkward to work with. The combination of these is why I thought microblogging might be a better model than IRC for real time communication over Freenet. Each user publishes messages in an outbox, and polls the outboxes of users they wish to follow. That, a UI, and integration into the web of trust plugin (to provide a list of other non-spammer users) can provide the very basics of microblogging. After that, the important optimizations include ways to discover new messages faster than polling everything, and ways to search hashtags and usernames and such efficiently. That's where things get both interesting and hard. Freenet latency is high: expect 5-10 seconds one way, with modest changes to Freenet. Even though you could build either chat or microblogging on the same underlying framework, calling it microblogging does a better job of setting user expectations. I put some thought into what the protocol should look like with a goal of optimizing speed and searchability. I wrote some test code, but nothing of any significance. You can find my thoughts on the protocol on Freenet: freenet:USK at cF9ctaSzA8w2JAfEqmIlN49tfrPdz2Q5M68m1m5r9W0,NQiPGX7tNcaXVRXljGJnFlKhnf0eozNQsb~NwmBAJ4k,AQACAAE/Fritter-site/2/ When writing a gsoc proposal, give some thought to what parts of the problem you want to tackle. It sounds like your experience and interests lie more in the direction of user interfaces. If that's correct, my suggestion would be to make that the focus of your proposal. For example, you could ignore the problems of protocol design (by using my proposal, for example -- I'm sure it could be improved, but it's probably good enough) and searching (by simply not implementing any). IMHO a well-written, easy to use interface is more important than hard features like search. Search support could be added later, once it has users. Evan Daniel
