On 3/28/10 1:44 PM, 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 I say "desktop application", I don't mean an application where
users can perform all GNU Social actions from a special application - I
mean a sort of management, backbone application to manage communication
between GNU Social nodes. The primary frontend should, I agree, live in
the browser.
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.
PHP simply isn't the language we want to use for the *backbone* of GNU
Social. It's all well and good for parsing data and displaying it to the
browser, but it simply isn't suited for the nitty-gritty work of
handling node-to-node communications - at least, not in the distributed,
p2p model that Ted Smith and I envision.
--
Henry L.
