Beaker 1.0 Beta – a peer-to-peer Web browser | Hacker News Reader

Beaker 1.0 Beta – a peer-to-peer Web browser

beakerbrowser.com

23 pointspfraze14 comments

This new version of Beaker took over a year to get done and is basically a ground-up rewrite. Team is here to answer any questions.

Congratulations on the progress and getting this out the door! It's very exciting to see significant work on Beaker. I look forward to playing with it.

Thanks! Let us know how it goes

Congrats on the milestone!

I've been following the Dat story for a few months, Congrats!

What do you consider to be THE killer feature(s) of Dat over the classic web? instant Publishing? Resilience?

Personally I think it's the hackability. Data is disconnected from apps (in your personal drives) and shared between applications. Hyperdrives are also forkable.

Beaker currently pushes people to create personal sites and build social applications around that. I think a very open social/identity system is just very cool.

There are also some things that are much easier than they normally are - for instance, you can setup a webrtc call using PeerSockets, so you don't need to setup a server to do that. The "zero devops" story is pretty nice.

Also, I love the "zero devops"! It's not a popular opinion but I really believe that once this kind of protocol will be more mature / have some success stories, the cloud mania could disappear as fast as it appeared!

So if I understand right: Hyperdrive (formerly Dat) is the "p2p platform" and beaker a client which uses hyperdrive to publish and browse archives and websites?

If I want to build an app using this, when should I choose hypercore and when should I choose hyperdrive?

Currently Beaker only has Web APIs for Hyperdrive, but we're going to add Hypercore APIs

Hypercore is lower-level - it's basically an append-only log. There have been some projects that use it directly such as Kappa-core [1]. You might want it particularly for CRDT work, but generally I think you can use the filesystem to do pretty much anything, and that has the benefit of a regular data-form that can be explored using the terminal and files explorer and browser and etc.

[1] https://github.com/kappa-db/kappa-core

Ack, thanks!

Has anyone build a forum on top of dat? Thinking of posting text but also images... or something like hn

To someone unfamiliar with p2p web core concepts (Hyperdrive, etc.) an "About" page would be helpful.

Yeah so Beaker uses a peer-to-peer filesystem called Hyperdrive to share websites. It works a lot like BitTorrent in that it shares bandwidth. Every drive has a public key and the data is signed in a log.

Since the Hyperdrive FS is read/writable from the browser, you can use web apis and in-browser tooling to work on the files. This even makes it possible to write applications by publishing posts/comments/votes/etc as files in the user's personal hyperdrives.

By default, every user creates a personal drive to act as their identity. We use that to act as a kind of social network, where the site is both their identity and their public data locker. The "twitter clone" is called Blahbity-blog, and it's very simple: it just reads the files you write to /microblog and merges that into a feed ordered by ctime. Typically you publish .md files but it can be anything, including .html (which runs in an iframe).

The p2p network uses a DHT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHT) with builtin hole-punching (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hole_punching_(networking)) to connect people's devices. You can also send messages between peers using that network with an API called PeerSockets.

Thank you. Appreciate the info.

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