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Comment by swah | Hacker News Reader

I just opened the two pages in rapid sucession (Localtunnel -> Pagekite) and was surprised by how different they are. wink

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PageKite is not a localtunnel clone, it is a much bigger concept. Otherwise I wouldn't have founded a company around it.

It just happens that the use case for web developers overlaps and that is what folks seem to care about around here. :-)

How much bigger?

http://pagekite.net/wiki/Floss/FreedomAndPrivacy/ is what motivates me - PageKite is an attempt to bootstrap a peer-to-peer web where IP addresses don't matter anymore and servers can run literally anywhere, so people can actually self-host content at home without learning all about IP addresses, routers, firewalls, DNS, SSL, ...

I don't know how much bigger that is than your vision, since I can only guess what your vision is. :-) I can guess based on your design, that until now you haven't cared much about people using localtunnel for anything except dev testing.

This was a total surprise! Interesting.

Also, may as well publicly repeat my invitation to have a chat about standardizing a protocol around this kind of thing. You're rewriting everything anyway... bre at pagekite dot net. :-)

Yes! I forgot all about that. Do you have your current protocol documented? I can document what I was going with and then we can go from there.

It needs updating for my flow control and on-line reconfiguration enhancements, but this is what I have got documented at the moment: https://pagekite.net/wiki/Floss/PageKiteProtocol/

If I were starting from scratch today, I'd base off websockets instead of the HTTP chunked encoding as I did, but other than that I have been very happy with it.

Cool. That's not far off from what I'm doing, plus I'm already using WebSockets. :)

Mail me! :-)

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