[ANN] Introducing Glasnost alpha: open source blog and app server for Steem/Golos blockchains
Today I'm pleased to introduce Glasnost: a second layer/platform/server between web/mobile clients and Steem blockchain. Glasnost primary design goal is making development of Steem/Golos applications easier, cheaper and faster. Glasnost is built with Elixir/Phoenix and is published under the MIT license. During the alpha period Glasnost will serve as a static blog app allowing Steem authors to publish their Steem blog on their own domain. All author's posts on Steem are automatically synced by Glasnost blog engine.
Glasnost repo
Glasnost alpha v0.1
Glasnost alpha is a static blog server for a single blog author. Glasnost will periodically synchronize content with new posts published on Steem. All data is stored by in-memory Mnesia database that is a part of Erlang/OTP platform.
Glasnost demo for @ontofractal
Tech stack
- Elixir
- Phoenix
- Mnesia
What's Glasnost?
Glasnost is a political slogan for increased openness and transparency in the Soviet Union during the perestroika period. It's also a wordplay based on the "Golos" name.
Glasnost Roadmap
This is a somewhat scratch your own itch product and is based on my experience with building apps and bots for Golos and Steem for last six months. I've found that developer experience of JSONRPC APIs is suboptimal and practice has shown that front-end apps require some sort of layer or a proxy (usually an SQL database). Glasnost aims to be a convenient and performant solution.
If successfully implemented Glasnost 1.0 will become a foundation to build advanced frontend and mobile clients without having to write backend code and will help developers to concentrate on creating value for the Steem/Golos ecosystem and application users.
Planned features:
- Convenient websockets APIs for accessing blockchain data
- Performant, low latency APIs
- Advanced filters and content display settings
- Integration with IPFS
- GraphQL support
- Real-time streams of blockchain events with access to enriched data
- In-memory database of blockchain objects
- Easy docker deployment
Development process
Glasnost is a single code base developed simultaneously both for Steem and Golos blockchains. Glasnost is made possible by the committed support of Golos open source ecosystem by @cyberfund. Read more about Golos and cyberfund open source support in this post by @hipster.
Deployment and Startup
Glasnost will be distributed as a docker image soon but at the moment deployment must be done manually. Step by step deployment instructions can be found here.
Feedback
If you have any requests or feedback, please get in touch with me: ontofractal at protonmail.com or steemit.chat.
This is exciting news, thanks for sharing and all this time and dedication to making it happen. All for one and one for all! Namaste :)
So is this like the ability to host Medium blogs on personal domains?
Yeah, a bit something like that.
That will be interesting and i'm already excited. Keep working and please make the implementation as easy as possible
have you made a medium post here outlining the benefits/cons ? :)
No I haven't. I stopped using Medium the day I discovered Steemit. I still have the app on my phone and do get notifications from time to time but i'm not active on it anymore.
looks great tho, maybe market there too, the blogs look nice I'm not sure if there are many readers. and the UI is really neat, I saw some of my ideas about steemit already on there I wonder if that is considered plagiarism :D
Do you have any ties to developers around here, I need some please help :)
Let's make steemit great, I want to share my ideas and open source them so they are as great as they can be, but I lack in the skills, I only have ideas and some designs if i take the time to make them :) so far I'm just stockpiling ideas and have nobody to bounce them off with, I was hoping for a small team of 10-20 people working together and making some major apps, I like what they started there, but I'm not sure what is going on
https://steemit.com/@team.alpha
Are you up for the challenge :) I was also thinking of extending the offer to krnel/son-of-satire and ego is you among others since they do care about the community. After we have something to show I hop he community here reacts like they did with your blockchain fiction :)
What do you think?
I've already commented my ideas in a few places, but all I get is good idea and that doesn't help at all, the only people that are supportive are jedau verbal maybe balllincounscious and you of course, but only whne I bump your heads so to speak, I think we are really a decentralized community and that isn't helping out that much :D
So again, if you are interested I want a team up and going, doing the important work of making
Basically I want to push the curve forward and move before others making the changes we all need and would like to see :) why wait when we can act and art :) we have enough information enough apps ad enough skills already :)
Of course Medium has the best design (UI and UX)! There are top top (high profile) writers there and many readers. The problem is that I wasn't getting the attention I needed as a budding writer.
Ideas are not that exclusive to anyone so I don't think it's plagiarism. Unfortunately I do not have any ties to programmers on here. I know how you feel when you get the "nice idea" feedback. It can be annoying 😃.
Maybe articulate these ideas and put them out into the open for anyone to pick up? That could work.
Sharing your thoughts go a long way.
This is awesome!
https://twitter.com/Soul_Eater_43/status/840718782582648832
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
We are on it fellow, thanks.
i love your post keep up the good work btw can you follow me thank you @bguerrero1986
the best steem news recently!! and, this is so cute!
That looks awesome!
I think I very much like this ontofractal, but it's hard for me a less techy person to wrap my head around how it works in practice.
Relinked in https://steemit.chat/channel/Activism_in_practice
Good. Resteemed.
Cool