This look very cool. I wonder if they'll have any legal issues with a name that sounds like "Skype". After all, Microsoft went after a guy whose business was Mike Rowe Software.
The idea looks pretty good, and it's OK if someone hacks it for themselves, but the implementation is lame, in my opinion. I understand that I can be a bit off-topic or ranting worthlessly on a simple hack that was intended to be just that, a simple hack.
It looks like people forgot how to develop simple protocols for this sort of thing. A simple protocol for remote named pipes, a client and a server, and a wrapper/gateway for dotCloud/HTTP wouldn't take a (very) long time to develop, wouldn't be completely dependent on an external service, and would probably develop into something bigger --- even for anonymous file sharing!
I really would like to know why programmers, in general, seem not to be doing this sort of thing anymore. Sorry if it looks like some sort of misplaced criticism, I'm posing all of it genuinely as a question to the community.
Ok first I tend to agree on the general remark : I have been in software development for a long time and a lot of recent solutions look totally overkill / overengineered for me.
But here, it makes the thing really easy, it autodeploys, the underpinning technology (0mq) makes the socket rendez-vous easy. For a first proof of concept I just love the usability !
Now yeah you can do it by installing a proxy on one of your servers ... ha but first you need a public server on the internet, tweak the services, expose it a little bit more to hacks etc etc ...
I'm not a Perl addict neither, but I'm using FEX in production and it worked flawlessly for more than a year now and hundreds of users.
Easy to install (inetd/xinetd), easy to upgrade, self cleaning, nice behaviour when you reach the limit, the command line tool are autonomous (just put them in your PATH), the developper is (very) reactive. It just works.
It is as efficient as the website is old-school =) I'm an enthousiastic FEX administrator and user !
