Olivier Forget

Deno 2 is here. My project Dropserver, an application platform for your personal web services, uses Deno as its app sandbox. Deno 2’s arrival forced me to break backwards compatibility in Dropserver, which is something I really don’t like doing. Here’s an explanation of why this happened, how it chafes with my vision for Dropserver, and how I plan to avoid this in the future. Deno code in Dropserver Dropserver is written in Go, but it runs apps written in JavaScript (or Typescript) inside Deno.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for September 2024. Here is last month’s report. Going Off On a Tangent from Tailscale Integration Tailscale integration is progressing. I am able to read information about the network, such as connection status, peers, etc… This data is dynamic and changes when the tailnet admin shares a node with someone, or a user connects a new device, etc… Some of this data has implications for the ds-host appspace owner.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for July and August 2024. Here is last month’s report. Work on Tailscale integration is ongoing, but before heading off on vacation I took some time to improve a Dropserver app that I use daily. Work on the ShoppingList App for Dropserver I finally put a bit of polish into the Shopping List app for Dropserver and released it: https://shoppinglist.olivierforget.net/ My wife and I had been using an earlier version of this for well over a year now and it was finally time to make it better.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for June 2024. Here is last month’s report. I started on the Tailscale integration, which began by getting the tsnet package, which resulted in a shock. Go get tailscale.com/tsnet … 😲 After entering the command the machine churned for several minutes while unfurling a seemingly endless listing of dependent packages required by tsnet. Yikes. tsnet loads lots of dependencies from the tailscale.com package which is expected.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for May 2024. Here is last month’s report. May was a “Spring cleaning” month. Before launching into my next big project (Tailscale integration) I want to have a clean code base, or at least clean out the obvious relics of ancient ideas that never fully blossomed. Here we go: Remove Unused Appspace DB Code Back in ancient times Dropserver apps could store data in a sqlite DB that was managed by Dropserver.

Dick Rutan died earlier last month. This caused me to revisit a time in my life when I worked for him, flew with him, and shared in the misadventures of a failed project with him. I worked for Dick from the Summer of 1998 to Spring 1999 while he was on his second attempt at being the first to go around the world in a balloon non-stop and non-refueled. He was already famous for his circumnavigation of Earth in the Voyager in 1986.

An unfortunate pitfall of modern computing is to be forced to make the choice between upgrading an operating system and continuing to use a beloved old app. Forcing this on users brings out some choice words for the developers of the OS, but a system that can evolve to its full potential while running old code is hard to build. I would like for Dropserver, an OS of sorts, to continue to run old apps for as long as possible even as it evolves.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for April 2024. Last month I said I would change how I do these. I want them shorter and more to the point. If any aspect of the work deserves a deeper technical dive it will be in a separate blog post. Here we go: Outbound Fetches Get Stuffed Last month I tried to implement outgoing net requests in a safe way for the user and instance.

With Deno 2.0 delayed again I recently tried to implement outbound net requests for Dropserver apps using Deno v1’s permission model. I was excited to offer this new capability for Dropserver apps but unfortunately things did not go as I had hoped. Problem Description In the current version of Dropserver an app is unable to make a dynamic request to another host. It’s blocked by the Deno sandbox: there is no --allow-net permission.

The World Wide Web is awesome. It’s “World-Wide”, and it’s a “Web”, meaning everybody and anybody can connect with everybody and anybody! Information is shared and everybody can read it! The WWW rocks. Well, it rocks for things that are meant to publicly available. Once you want to share information with just one or a few people things get a little weird. If you want to host your own private little island on the web for just you and a few known friends or family you find that the web is hostile to your intentions.