On Wednesday 14 Mar 2012 10:53:02 Nicolas Hernandez wrote: > Hello, > > One of my expert (francis) ask me if it is a good idea to developp a > frontend like Azureus wich could embed a freenet node ? > Have you some reasons to say that this is a bad idea as personnal time > invertissment ? The Freenet dev community is ok to receive this sort of > contribution ?
It's essential that Freenet itself can run as a daemon, i.e. without a GUI. It could minimise to system tray or something though. Usually front ends talk to freenet via FCP. This is flexible. Uptime: Freenet needs high uptime if at all possible. So it should be able to run in the background, possibly minimising to system tray, but anything that encourages on-demand usage is going to lead to poor performance; freenet should start on login by default, although of course that can be configurable. A front end is interesting in a number of ways though. Most of them relate to fproxy: - Avoid loads of browser hacks, most of them related to security. - Control audio/video playback in detail, avoid the need to filter audio/video. - Faster, simpler web-pushing style response (e.g. have a single progress bar for all images on the page which takes into account sub-blocks). The ones that don't really relate to fproxy: - Better GUI for choosing where to upload files from or save them to. - Transparently avoid security issues with this on a multi-user system (as the UI is running as the logged in user). Some stuff related to this is here: https://bugs.freenetproject.org/view.php?id=2830 Personally I don't think that a web UI is a necessarily bad UI; how many people use webmail for their email today? Way more than use dedicated email clients. Traditionally p2p software has had windowed UIs, but that doesn't mean they are easy to use. Freenet's ease of use (and even aesthetic) problems come from other areas e.g. determining what the user does and does not need to be asked about. A further complication is that if you write a front-end and people like it they may want it on their One True Platform ... :) IMHO the most important thing is sorting out the web interface. But I wouldn't be opposed to you developing a windowed UI. (Also note somebody did develop an Azureus plugin; at the time the performance of downloads was around 1KB/sec, this was the main difficulty! It's a bit better than that today for popular/recent files :) ) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 198 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20120315/84ca302d/attachment.pgp>
