Month: August 2013

HTML5 is built on the assumption of a client/server web. Below I walk through the issues this raises for the peer to peer web. The good news is that we really don’t need terribly many changes to HTML5 to make it peer to peer friendly. Basically we need a new same origin policy that is based on certs rather than hosts, a way to handle mutual auth requests, standardized support for node.js (or equivalent) and a few other minor things.

HTML 5 contains a dizzying array of features. Below I created a cheat sheet identifying features that I think are likely to have some relevance to the peer to peer web. This is mostly for my own reference. Note that not all these features are actually part of HTML 5. Some were standardized separately. Some haven’t finished standardization. But whatever, this gives me a sense of the landscape.

Services built on a peer to peer web inevitably run into the synchronization problem. How do you keep state on multiple peers in synch? Below I walk through the assumptions and requirements that led me to believe a multi-master eventually consistent model is the best base to work off of.

I really need to synch both arbitrary structured data and blobs in in a multi-master peer to peer environment. Oh and I really don’t want to write the code to make this work and it has to work on a variety of mobile, desktop and cloud environments. And yes, I want a pony with that. Thankfully there are pony’s for everyone! The solution? CouchDB, duh!