Re: [Social-discuss] Languages -- let's make a web application

[Henry Litwhiler]

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.