Personal Web-Server Technology

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Description

“I choose to see personal web‐server technology (Opera Unite, Firefox POW, etc) as a breakthrough technology, so people can put their own data into the cloud without paying Flickr or whomever. It is this sort of 'personal technology' I believe will characterize (what we now call) Web 3.0 (and not 3D, or semantic web, etc.). So my dilemma is that, while these technologies are pretty evident today, it is not clear that the people I suspect Pew counts as “the savviest innovators” are looking at them. So I pick “out of the blue” even though (I think) I can see them coming from a mile away.”

– Stephen Downes, National Research Council, Canada [1]


Examples

Opera Unite - a browser-based mini p2p server

Lawrence Eng, product analyst for Opera Software, goes into some detail on what Opera Unite is meant to be: This technology is a radical first step towards addressing what I call “the Internet’s unfulfilled promise”, which is about our ability to connect with each other and participate meaningfully online—on our own terms, and without losing control of our data.

Opera Unite is a form of collaboration technology that allows you to share data such as files or photos with other users, directly from your computer . You can also communicate directly with others by hosting chat sessions or posting notes. The technology behind Opera Unite uses a compact server inside the Opera desktop browser to share data and applications.

Opera Unite runs on three platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix.

Opera Unite is based on common Web technologies like HTML and JavaScript.

The initial applications offered by Opera Unite are just simple demos (such as a “messenger” application and a media player) that replicate existing services and online functionality, showing them working in the context of Opera Unite. That’s just the tiniest tip of the iceberg—the potential for what can be done is much larger. The key to Opera Unite is that it enables a whole new class of social software on the Web, applications that benefit from two or more people being online at the same time. And, with Opera Unite, these people can all connect directly without needing middlemen who control third-party servers.

Social networking is important, but who owns it — the online real estate and all the content we share on it? How much control over our words, photos, and identities are we giving up by using someone else’s site for our personal information? How dependent have we become? I imagine that many of us would lose most of our personal contacts if our favorite Web mail services shut down without warning...

More information is available on the Opera Unite FAQ and Support page [2]


Firefox POW -- Plain Old Webserver (a browser add-on)

The Plain Old Webserver adds a fully-functional open source (GPL) webserver to the Firefox browser. POW has been created by David Kellogg.

POW uses Server Side Javascript (SJS), PHP, Perl, Python or Ruby to deliver dynamic content.

Installers are available for Windows and Mac.

A USB version combines both the Mac and Windows XULrunner versions into one install. It unzips into the root directory of a USB pen drive and clicking on the Pow_Mac or Pow_Win will load POW for Mac or PC. A secure version is ready for testing.

More information on David Kellogg's Plain Old Webserver's Wiki page [3]

Download on the Mozilla Add-ons page [4]