TeleHash: Distributed JSON Peering Protocol | Hacker News Reader

TeleHash: Distributed JSON Peering Protocol

telehash.org

54 pointsbootload22 comments

I'll admit that I only clicked through because the S was in a weird font.

"... I only clicked through because the S was in a weird font. ..."

A font to bring out the metal fans - I got this post reading "The havoc the XML purists wrought" ~ http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/05/19/theHavocTheXmlPu... Dave talking about Jeremie Miller and his new protocol and it relates to this HN post ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1360756

  >>> u'TeleHa⚡h'
  u'TeleHa\u26a1h'

HIGH VOLTAGE SIGN (U+26A1)

I get a square with a question mark :(

It's a great idea but I feel like this protocol is a bit more heavy than it needs to be.

I've done my best so far to reduce it to it's most minimal required components to just get the job done, and in the last six months it's slimmed down significantly already, not sure much more can get cut out.

My plan is to get some standard libs and utils written next to hide the frustrating complexity required to build this mesh with peers and proxy the chaos-management for apps.

Care to expound on that?

The idea of using JSON in a very informal, global messaging system is a really strong one. Messaging is huge these days but pub/sub systems still aren't as commoditized as they should be.

However, Telehash's reliance on UDP means we'll still be worrying about whether or not our message made it. Its' confusing lexicon (telex? dial? listen?) is unnecessary for simple cases.

Telehash should be simpler and closer to HTTP.

tldr: we spend too much time writing pub/sub systems that talk JSON, but this is too much to learn.

I think the choice of UDP is based on the use of Kademlia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia

maybe they used udp for speed and for udp hole punching over firewalls.

If you want to use the protocol within a browser, there is no standard (included by default in the browser) UDP socket interface accessible from js. Nice to use JSON but I'm still wondering how they could use UDP from the Browser? using "faked" DNS queries to generate UDP traffic?

There's a reason most of the world uses TCP.. even for things that sound ideal for UDP.

When you've got a hammer...

TCP isn't ideal for everything. Ad-hoc networking and broadcast streaming being just two.

There's a reason why UDP was invented.

There's a reason why UDP was invented.

And that reason was not sending time-insensitive text messages.

JXTA handles this by specifying neither. Instead they have a "pipe" abstraction. Once peers discover each other they can open a pipe that may, depending upon the network conditions, be a fast TCP implementation (when a direct connection is possible) or a slower, but usable pipe built on HTTP with polling (for being able to traverse firewalls).

Exactly, it's the only option left in order to let apps talk directly across the unwieldily myriad of network configurations (NATs).

Feels like JXTA with JSON in the place of XML.

node.js needs UDP.

    _ry: fictorial: eventually, not for 0.2

http://nodejs.debuggable.com/2010-05-07.txt

UDP over SOAP. Reliability of SOAP + speed of UDP ~

yeah, right...

I thought ~ was the universal mark of sarcasm :-/

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