PoC the app technologies

[magwas]

A small android application, which

• can store a file to the distributed store
• stores the hash of the file with ethereum

• retrieves stored xml and xslt file from the distributed store
• applies the xslt to the xml using saxon (this version: https://github.com/orbeon/saxon)
• stores the result just like in 1.

[krosza]

• the stored data should be encrypted

[wigy-opensource-developer]

• Neither Daniel, nor I have any experience in Android development.
• If we develop an Android-specific application, it will not be usable from iOS, Windows, Macs or Linux.
• It is not worth storing data on mobile devices, because the churn is high (WiFi and 4G coverage changes too often, battery saving drops connections, etc.).
• Computation-intensive things are not worth running on mobile devices. Battery lifetime is an issue there.

Based on all above, should not we think about a web application, which runs on a ZeroNet proxy? We definitely find one man per condominium who has an always on machine. If not then we sell them a raspberry pre-installed.

[magwas]

• It's a good opportunity to gain the needed experience. I neither have any, but will bootstrap the project for you.
• There are development environment which are able to create apps for all major phone/tablet platforms. On PC platform they can be ran in an emulator, if not supported natively.
• We can add seeder servers to help the infrastructure, but one of the design goals is to be fully peer-to-peer. Trends suggest that mobile device being offline will cease to be a problem soon, if it is even a problem now.
• Today's mobile devices are more powerful than servers of the past.

[wigy-opensource-developer]

In the last weeks I was evaluating technologies for our (as in De-Central Budapest) open-source projects. My current stance is that to build a good developer community, we need to use only a few technologies that work well together and which are easy to learn even for newcomers into that technology.

• Learning and using HTML5-CSS3-ES5 seems to be unavoidable nowadays.
• Vue.js seems to help a lot in writing composable, reusable presentation code.
• ES2015 or TypeScript seems to be feasible for writing domain code (business logic).
• Express seems to serve the pages from a centralized server.
• Electron provides a good wrapper for deployed applications that are kept up-to-date on Windows, Mac and Linux
• Cordova provides the tooling for applications deployed on mobile devices like Android, iOS, Blackberry and Windows Phone.

This stack allows us to integrate both clearnet web-services like ADA or darknet services like ZeroNet and the SAFE Network.

The Android API has a steep learning curve. Quite some bad applications exist because most developers give up understanding the philosophy behind their API. If it is unavoidable, we can continue with that, but creating a mobile app that does not deplete battery, survives low-memory situations and is supported on lots of devices is hard.