[Monotone-devel] Re: Future of monotone

[Graydon Hoare]

Graydon Hoare wrote:

> My plan here was to rip out netsync, packets, basic_io, netio, and the 
> old cert system. Put in the new cert system and the new sync system, and 
>  replace the automate commands with json-speaking equivalents. Do away 
> with all the legacy i/o stuff, and provide one that's actually easy to 
> speak.
>
> The idea was that this would both make hosting and deploying much easier 
> -- HTTP is more friendly 

Oh, I also forgot to add: HTTP has a well-defined mechanism for vhosting 
or placing multiple mtn scgi slaves serving different databases under 
the same external-facing HTTP port. I think this is a better solution 
than the hand-built usher system we have. And doing SSL. And lots of stuff.

But the main point was just to make it easy to talk to without any 
intermediaries. JSON+HTTP is very appealing to frontend authors. There's 
a very large body of people who program browser-resident UIs exclusively 
now, and they are most comfortable with something they can XHR to get 
JSON blobs from. If you integrate the "database sync service" and 
"general public data browsing" interfaces, your frontends can develop 
100% on the client side, without any special setup effort.

-Graydon