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Sorry, you misunderstand; technically it is a "solved problem" I agree. The issue is that it would be a web app not a client - and you have a limit of how long

by ErrantX 17y ago

Sorry, you misunderstand; technically it is a "solved problem" I agree. The issue is that it would be a web app not a client - and you have a limit of how long you can run requests for (and, also, if your hosting the app it means pretty much we are limited to PHP - and no fancy stuff like asynchronous requests etc) Example: if I have 150 friends and I send a "search request" to them, who then send a "search request" to their 150 friends - for, say, 3 levels of iteration that is a lot of work every page is doing - all within one basic request.

lallysingh 17y ago
Control the search via ajax in the searcher's web browser. Think hierarchal DNS lookups, only fanning out instead.
DennisP 17y ago
One approach: send a url which accepts replies, with a RequestID field. Now you just have to wait for your friends' servers to accept your request. Pubsubhubbub works this way iirc. To the extent your friends are on the same server, you speed things up more. If you got online by accepting an invitation from a friend, that will tend to happen. It'd still be better to have asynch requests. I'm not so sure PHP is necessary these days. A nicely packaged virtual machine can work pretty well for a small group. I don't think many people would be setting up web apps just for themselves.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  > A nicely packaged virtual machine can work pretty well for a small group. Well what I have specced out is to compete with Facebook and offer a privacy concious service to the masses. So something like that is infeasible for a number of reasons.
  - DennisP 17y ago
    Obviously all these small groups would talk to each other with an open protocol and function as a single large network. In fact, looking again at your proposal, you mention pubsubhubbub. As long as we're using that, we could send search requests to friends, just like we send status updates. Each of them forwards to their own hub. The search data includes the URL for posting results, and a time-to-live that gets decremented each time the search is forwarded. Now we can get back to the simple PHP site.

by ErrantX 17y ago

lallysingh 17y ago

Control the search via ajax in the searcher's web browser. Think hierarchal DNS lookups, only fanning out instead.

DennisP 17y ago

One approach: send a url which accepts replies, with a RequestID field. Now you just have to wait for your friends' servers to accept your request. Pubsubhubbub works this way iirc. To the extent your friends are on the same server, you speed things up more. If you got online by accepting an invitation from a friend, that will tend to happen. It'd still be better to have asynch requests. I'm not so sure PHP is necessary these days. A nicely packaged virtual machine can work pretty well for a small group. I don't think many people would be setting up web apps just for themselves.

ErrantX 17y ago
> A nicely packaged virtual machine can work pretty well for a small group. Well what I have specced out is to compete with Facebook and offer a privacy concious service to the masses. So something like that is infeasible for a number of reasons.
- DennisP 17y ago
  Obviously all these small groups would talk to each other with an open protocol and function as a single large network. In fact, looking again at your proposal, you mention pubsubhubbub. As long as we're using that, we could send search requests to friends, just like we send status updates. Each of them forwards to their own hub. The search data includes the URL for posting results, and a time-to-live that gets decremented each time the search is forwarded. Now we can get back to the simple PHP site.