

P2P Web Apps - Brace yourselves, everything is about to change. - fr0ggerz
http://happyworm.com/blog/2011/03/07/p2p-web-apps-brace-yourselves-everything-is-about-to-change/
The old client-server web model is out of date, it’s on its last legs, it will eventually die. We need to move on, we need to start thinking differently if we are going to create web applications that are robust, independent and fast enough for tomorrow’s generation.
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mukyu
This reminds me of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2245149>

All of this talk strikes me as coming from people that have implemented
neither large web applications nor distributed or p2p applications at all
dreaming up schemes with no idea of how they would actually work.

I think an illustrative example is how Twitter spends significant engineering
effort (with Cassandra and now Rainbird) just to implement a _counter_ in a
scalable fashion.

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baggachipz
The OP is ignoring a total deal-killer for this type of model: Proprietary
code needs to remain so. It's what brings value to a service like Twitter. It
would be great for open-source apps, but that is a small slice of the web's
pie. Does he really think that Twitter will distribute their server-side
source to browsers to execute locally? Even if it were compiled, the risk is
too great for a company who relies on its unique property being the only
differentiator in the marketplace.

~~~
DennisP
The upside is you can run your code on other people's hardware and bandwidth,
so you don't need revenue just to keep running.

I think a bigger problem for a lot of applications is security. Distributing
your app where anyone can modify nodes and data arbitrarily is fine for some
applications, but not all.

Down the road, something like Byzantine Paxos might help.

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fr0ggerz
I think whoever implements this type of model will eventually have the upper-
hand, open-sourcing your code seems a small price to pay for robustness, auto-
scaling and performance.

I don't think Twitter's success is down to its code being proprietary. I think
you're selling them short.

