[tahoe-dev] webapps on top of tahoe-lafs: howto - newbie questions

[Andy Wingo]

Hi list!

Apologies in advance for my broad ignorance; as soon as I make some
progress in one field, whole new frontiers come into view :)

I just subscribed a few weeks ago, so I didn't have the pleasure of
seeing elcalamartevigila's mail when it came in, but I'm interested in
the same "space".  I would like to write distributed web applications
that use some secure, distributed key-value(s) store.

Specifically I am interested in distributed data structures.  Tahoe-LAFS
seems like a great start, but it seems to currently lack support for
some paradigms.

 * It seems that Tahoe-LAFS is most appropriate for "friendnet"
   operation, and is not so supportive of larger-scale, more
   intermittent networks, with more "edge" storage than "center"
   storage.

 * Relatedly, Tahoe-LAFS does not seem to provide for caching of
   "popular" content.

 * I don't see a good way to support "seed-your-own"-style operation:
   where you have data that you care about, that you would like to
   expose to the global DHT, but which you need stronger guarantees of
   persistence.  A friendnet persistent layer combined with some more
   robust global DHT sounds like it could work.

 * I don't see a way for someone to securely send a message to you using
   Tahoe-LAFS.  This is related to the directory rollback problem, and
   could be solved if Tahoe-LAFS exposed all values associated with a
   key, as is done with Kademlia keywords for example.

 * However, it does seem that one can profitably build interesting
   datastructures on top of simple k-v stores, as Tahoe shows, though it
   might require good programming language support for asynchronicity,
   multiple returns from lookup procedures, etc.

But, I have learned a lot from Tahoe, and expect to keep on learning.
Thanks for the software, papers, and really weird mutable file algorithm
;-)

Cheers,

Andy
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