App Hosting

[Pertempto]

How will we host our apps on the internet?

It would be ideal to implement all our apps in a way that they could be self hosted for those that want that kind of thing. However, our target users aren't necessarily going to be very techy, and if our apps are going to be of any use to them then we need to have some sort of publicly hosted version of each app.

[Pertempto]

@DavidLandes I bought the domain name kwila.cloud a while ago - I have been planning to use it as a place for hosting free personal apps for people to use.

I was originally planning on making it with pretty much the same tech that I used for kookaburra.cloud, but a lot of that tech is very much vendor-specific - a lot of firebase stuff.

Maybe I should look into using more common/open technologies to setup kwila.cloud? If we use the same basic idea of the K api and packages I have been working on for Kookaburra, we could save ourselves a lot of duplicate work in the long run. We could probably write the apps in such a way that they could run locally, on Kwila, and on Kookaburra. The main thing to make that work would be removing a lot of the limitations that the Kookaburra environment puts in place but I'm totally fine with pursuing that on my own time.

How would you feel about this? You have no stake in Kookaburra so I don't want my interest in Kookaburra to bias how we design our el-apps system. However, we could end up saving ourselves a lot of duplicate work long term if I open sourced the K api and packages and transformed Kookaburra more into a specific hosting platform for open source apps. I'm thinking this would be very similar to how Gitlab community edition is open source but they make their money by selling the SaaS to businesses.

This is probably a conversation that we should have face to face, there's a lot of pieces involved😆

[Pertempto]

to sum it up...

basically we could design a package kapi that defines an open API that apps can use to perform common tasks.

we would implement some sort of local version of kapi that we can use to develop our apps locally

a slight modification of this local version should be enough to create kwila.cloud, which runs in the cloud for personal use apps

I could then also make a proprietary version of kapi that i run on kookaburra.cloud

[Pertempto]

I created a proof of concept app - https://github.com/el-apps/random-numbers

Tomorrow I will experiment with how difficult it is to get it available on kwila.cloud

[Pertempto]

It took all day

but random-numbers should now be publicly available - https://random-numbers.kwila.cloud/

this is just a proof-of-concept, but it's an exciting one!