I wish https://solidproject.org/ made more sense to me.
It just seems like they have taken web-hosting concepts and renamed them all.
What's the actual novelty? No idea; and it's buried in an avalanche of new acronyms.
I be dumb!
@dbat The novelty is splitting up identity, storage and application into 3 separate things. These concepts are usually in one place in traditional web dev.
@ylebre I don't understand that. Today, they are separate too. ID is all over the place, storage too and so are applications.
How does Solid "split" these up? Surely it's bringing them together into the one "pod"?
(Thanks for the reply BTW!)
@dbat I think the main difference is that the storage/pod is under the control of the user instead of the application. In traditional webdev, the app builder will decide if you data is stored on AWS for example. In the case of Solid, the user picks the storage location instead. This might seem like a small change, but it shifts around a lot of the responsibilities.
In current terms an "app" can be something *your* website (on a server) does _or_ it can be something that another web-server does that you login to (mostly).
How does Solid change that?
If there was a Solid Wikipedia (for e.g.) would each article be in a separate pod (per author)?
I kind of imagine a 'pod' as a combination of Folders/files + a server + some kind of server-side code execution -> all in one concept. Is that about right?
@dbat My favorite approach is one where the app does all the logic client-side, in the browser. That way, the app server never even accesses the data in the storage pod.
@ylebre That sounds like a web-side app which does not even need the concept of a solid-pod then.
It's just code doing stuff with local storage.
No?
@dbat Kind of, except you get to take the data with you to other devices if you want that. There are a bunch of projects that start localstorage first, and add storage later. @noeldemartin has very nice apps that do this approach.
@ylebre @dbat Hey, thanks for recommending my apps :D.
I see how Solid can be confusing at first, I recently wrote a blog post answering exactly this question "Why would anyone use Solid?": https://noeldemartin.com/blog/why-solid
Though maybe it's easier to see it in practice... You can use one of my apps (for example, this recipe manager), and the point of Solid is that you or anyone else could also make an app using recipes that works with the same data. No need to choose only one: https://umai.noeldemartin.com/
@dbat Unfortunately, that's one of the things I address in the article; there isn't any good POD provider I can recommend :(.
But things being what they are, the best recommendation I have is solidcommunity.net for an online account, and the Community Solid Server to play with Solid locally: https://github.com/CommunitySolidServer/CommunitySolidServer
The good news is that if an app is made properly, there shouldn't be any difference between an online account or localhost. I myself use a local POD when I'm just testing apps.
@noeldemartin BTW, a nice article. It's answering a lot of questions and I will follow all the links. Thanks.
@noeldemartin I made a test recipe and tried to save/connect it to my pod (*), but did something dumb with the permissions which seemed too global, and now I can't alter them again. Argh! 😜
(*) solidcommunity.net
I get a bit of an idea/feeling now. Your recipe app can save data to my 'pod' . My pod is really a "cloud" in this analogy.
Do you have a good suggestion for a Solid pod provider (whatever the word is) I can join with? What's the latest and best?