Olivier Forget

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.

This is the monthly progress report for Dropserver for March 2024. The previous report is here. This happens to be the twelfth month for which I am publishing an update (the first progress update covered April-June 2023). A full year! Yay me. It’s also time for me to change how I write these posts. I think I’ll make them shorter and more to the point and I will dedicate complete blog posts when a topic deserves deeper examination.

This is the monthly progress report for Dropserver for February 2024. The previous report is here. The Big Picture This will be a short report because I spent half of this month on vacation, which limited my work. After Releasing 0.13 last month I am allowing myself some time to explore tangential projects while also chipping away at some Dropserver issues. Getting Lume to Work I have been trying to get Lume to work in a Dropserver app.

This is the monthly progress report for Dropserver for January 2024. The previous report is here. The Big Picture Dropserver 0.13 is out! 🎉 This is the release that lets Dropserver install apps from a 3rd party website. If you’ve been reading these progress reports, you know it’s been a long time coming. Getting to a Release Before releasing I had to add a few more features and close up some unfinished work.

This is the monthly progress report for Dropserver for December 2023. The previous report is here. The Big Picture I made a big push to get version 0.13 out the door. While I didn’t succeed at actually cutting the release, the most challenging part is complete and I am now just adding a few more items. I also continued developing thoughts on how to take Dropserver to the next stage. I started work on getting ds-dev to work on the Windows operating system.

This is the monthly progress report for Dropserver for November 2023. The previous report is here. The Big Picture Although my main coding focus was getting Dropserver to install and update an application that is hosted on a third party website I got side-tracked by big thoughts on other topics. These don’t help the release tempo but are crucial for steering Dropserver in the right direction in the long term.

This is the monthly progress report for Dropserver for October 2023. The previous report is here. The Big Picture My focus is on getting Dropserver to install and update an application that is hosted on a third party website. Most of the work is really just thinking about what the endpoints look like on the third party site, and all the different ways a user will proceed through the steps of installing an app and create an appspace, in particular thinking about how unattended upgrades will work.

This is the monthly progress report for Dropserver for September 2023. The previous report is here. The Big Picture I worked on finishing app changelogs and started working on installing apps from a URL. This is all part of “Dropserver App Packaging and Distribution” project. I also spent some time thinking about how to present Dropserver.org, how to make it more easily usable, and whether working on app distribution is the best way to spend my time now.

This is the third progress report for Dropserver. This one will be very short thanks to a much needed vacation during most of the month. See last month’s report The Big Picture After the release of version 0.11 I took some time for exploratory thinking. Upon my return from vacation I went to work on the “distribution” part of “app packaging and distribution”. Exploratory Thinking I18N I collected links to tools and libraries that are used for translating apps with the goal of some day doing the work of making Dropserver localizable.