What Opera is about to Unveil?
asserttrue.blogspot.com
asserttrue.blogspot.com
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We start our little story with the invention of the modern day computer.
Over the years, the computers grew in numbers, and the next natural step in the evolution was to connect them together. To share things.
But as these little networks grew, some computers gained more power than the rest and called themselves servers ...
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All computers are having enough power that each of them can become a server now? <meta name="description" content="The Web is your browser. .." />
In 2004, I did the same with Limewire, but again, nobody included my code.
I've come to accept it as a total failure, and since then I've known that it's best to get the job done yourself, as otherwise collaboration depends on their priorities.
The Hicksdesign tweet also says something about the convenience of having "a connection wherever you are" = Freedom?
I don't know, but here is what I think:
Opera is already serving millions of mobile users through their proxy servers. I think there is support in the upcoming version of Opera(v10) to connect to the web though the proxy server. Now they certainly would want to monetize this traffic. What would they do? Give internet connection for free (using some USB device) and then serve ads. But how does this USB device connect to the servers? May be they have made a tie up with some telecom majors.
Of course, this is also a speculation , just as ridiculous as the OP.
One of my friends suggested it might just be the release of Opera 10.
The "hard parts" would be reliable dns resolution, finding common ISP open ports, and security of all kinds.
The networking issues aren't that problematic : the local app would periodically update a central database with the computer's IP (dyndns.org has been doing this for years) and an available open port. So when you identify yourself on the http://freedom.opera.com service, you are redirected to http://YOUR-COMPUTER.freedom.opera.com:OPEN-PORT/.
So basically, Opera would be going against the current trend of putting all your data in "the cloud". Sounds interesting to me…
Still, you can achieve the "web server" thing by establishing a client-server connection to the Opera central server and the Opera central server will act like a "router". That, is more like what Windows Live file sharing feature.
Opera all these years acts like a good citizen with W3C's guideline. There is no way for Opera to support two-way ajax because there is no general standard.
for example, any bittorrent client 'drills' holes through firewalls and routers to receive incoming connections.
It's already there. The UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) is supported by virtually every consumer-grade "router" out there. For one, it can be used to dynamically configure port forwarding on the router so a server application on the inside of the router would become accessible from the Internet.
(a) Dynamic DNS client
(b) UPnP client
(c) built-in browser
Specifically, if I need to share a file with someone, the Opera will host this file locally and generate a unique URL that will point at my box and will be served by Opera's web server. I will then be able to pass this URL around and the recipients will fetch the file using their browsers directly from my machine.
I hadn't heard of this before, but now my interest is peaked.
Piqued. Unless this is the most interest you've ever given Opera ;)
Going open source would be cool, but given the nature of the comment on that page, my money's on something like an embedded webserver, with some interesting means of finding and sharing things with it. Maybe some integration with Opera Link, so users can always find one of your running clients (or even Opera in --server mode somewhere on 24/7; something their good cross-platform support will help).
Opera do have a very good full text search engine, currently used for email and to index the content on every page you visit, and obviously has the ability to easily generate HTML from content it has stored and indexed; if they wanted to go this route they could easily make some sort of CMS using it.
They also do blogs on my.opera. Maybe an integrated blogging engine, which can serve content on its own and also upload it to services using some open protocol anyone can implement (e.g. pushing people to support importing .atom feeds). Publish content on your browser, push it to any online service which supports it, and keep it locally accessible and indexable and outside the control of any third party.
:-) Should've looked it up. But I thought "hey, my other option - "peeked" - is definitely wrong, so this one must be right" :-) Thanks.
As for the open source thing, I wouldn't put money on it, but I do think it would be very cool :-) I really don't have a clue what it can be. I just hope it won't be a let down :-)