Hosting anywhere

During this week I have got the good news that ShareIt! will be included as part of two PhD thesis (woah!!!) that it's something several light years far away about what I would consider a success (Stefan Dühring and Arindra Das, truly thanks you so much! :-D ) with the exception of an e-mail with a job offer from Google :-P

But in both cases they had problems to deploy and test the code locally because they didn't finish to get the concept of being a pure client-side webapp, but at the same time requiring a handshake signaling server and a DataChannels backend server, so both asked me about a non-existent node.js server that hosted and served the app (I got problems while developing ShareIt! and DataChannel-polyfill to change my mind from a client-server way of thinking to a pure distributed one, and the telling the truth the WebRTC specification doesn't help about this for the non-specialized people...). I got a little bit obsesed about this point and to prove that being a pure client side webapp there's no necesity of a hosting server (just a simple static file web server), inspired by a recent idea I got about using DropBox to increase speed of downloads (enabling more host peers) and as backup of peers transfer, I decided to retake the fact that DropBox can be used as a basic static web server and improve the support for it. This included change all external references to use secure connections since DropBox serve the files through a SSL enabled connection, and if the content is not secure the web browsers would complain to protect the user (and that's ugly). On the other hand this allowed to encrypt all the communications so it's a win-win situation :-)

But this was not enough, I needed to show more versatility, and got it: I found this blog entry that explain in an almost step-by-step way how to explote DropBox and GitHub as free static pages web servers, and specially for deploiment of webapps. Just a sweet :-)

So here we are, currently I'm able to serve and host ShareIt! on three different web services, all directly availables on the web and interoperable between them: 5Apps, DropBox and unexpectedly GitHub, and also it's installable as browser extension. Add to this the fact that Firefox 18 "Alder" now start to have native support for DataChannels and WebKit already has it (Chrome v25 will have to wait a little bit more), and we are almost up to a point where ShareIt! will be impossible to take down (I hope that on the RealTimeWeb hackathon I would be able to get a way to drop-off the handshake server and reach the Holy Grail of Internet... :-P).

Let's the revolution begin!!! :-D