[Freedombox-discuss] Joyent & node.js

[James Vasile]

The Joyent Connect was a google-services-in-a-box.  You get a suite that
does email, file server, contacts, todo (and other) lists, and calendar,
all written in what looks like fairly clean, well-structured Ruby.
There's some Facebook integration, although I'm sure the Facebook API
has changed since this stuff was written.

They say it was zero config and zero maintenance, but I couldn't find
any evidence that this was anything more than marketing hype.  I didn't
see anything on the web or in the code to support inter box connectivity
or user identities across boxes.

The code hasn't been touched since Jan 2009.  Joyent is now a cloud data
server business and they don't appear to offer collaboration software
among their services.

I googled up some screenshots of their interfaces
<http://www.opensourcerails.com/screenshots/199/original/peopleContactBig.png>.
I could only get a general sense of the design: not innovative, but
clean and simple.  Not dated by a couple years on the shelf.

Clint is setting up an env so we can look at it.  Maybe we can make
that public (not sure if that box is anywhere near a public interface).

This is top-of-stack stuff.  We'd need to create the Freedom Stack
underneath that does all the privacy / user model stuff and then connect
it up.  It's not a bad idea, Dave.  Thanks for suggesting it!

We might also explore the idea of running this stuff without the Freedom
Stack until the Stack is ready.