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-GNU MediaGoblin
-
-* About
-
-What is MediaGoblin? I'm shooting for:
-
- - Initially, a place to store all your photos that's as awesome as,
- more awesome than, existing proprietary solutions
- - Later, a place for all sorts of media, such as video, music, etc
- hosting.
- - Federated, like statusnet/ostatus (we should use ostatus, in fact!)
- - Customizable
- - A place for people to collaborate and show off original and derived
- creations
- - Free, as in freedom. Under the GNU AGPL, v3 or later. Encourages
- free formats and free licensing for content, too.
-
-Wow! That's pretty ambitious. Hopefully we're cool enough to do it.
-I think we can.
-
-It's also necessary, for multiple reasons. Centralization and
-proprietization of media on the internet is a serious problem and
-makes the web go from a system of extreme resilience to a system
-of frightening fragility. People should be able to own their data.
-Etc. If you're reading this, chances are you already agree though. :)
-
-* Milestones
-
-Excepting the first, not necessarily in this order.
-
-** Basic image hosting
-** Multi-media hosting (including video and audio)
-** API(s)
-** Federation
-
-Maybe this is 0.2 :)
-
-** Plugin system
-
-* Technology
-
-I have a pretty specific set of tools that I expect to use in this
-project. Those are:
-
- - *[[http://python.org/][Python]]:* because I love, and know well, the language
- - *[[http://www.mongodb.org/][MongoDB]]:* a "document database". Because it's extremely flexible
- (and scales up well, but I guess not down well)
- - *[[http://namlook.github.com/mongokit/][MongoKit]]:* a lightweight ORM for mongodb. Helps us define our
- structures better, does schema validation, schema evolution, and
- helps make things more fun and pythonic.
- - *[[http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/][Jinja2]]:* for templating. Pretty much django templates++ (wow, I
- can actually pass arguments into method calls instead of tediously
- writing custom tags!)
- - *[[http://wtforms.simplecodes.com/][WTForms]]:* for form handling, validation, abstraction. Almost just
- like Django's templates,
- - *[[http://pythonpaste.org/webob/][WebOb]]:* gives nice request/response objects (also somewhat djangoish)
- - *[[http://pythonpaste.org/deploy/][Paste Deploy]] and [[http://pythonpaste.org/script/][Paste Script]]:* as the default way of configuring
- and launching the application. Since MediaGoblin will be fairly
- wsgi minimalist though, you can probably use other ways to launch
- it, though this will be the default.
- - *[[http://routes.groovie.org/][Routes]]:* for URL routing. It works well enough.
- - *[[http://jquery.com/][JQuery]]:* for all sorts of things on the javascript end of things,
- for all sorts of reasons.
- - *[[http://beaker.groovie.org/][Beaker]]:* for sessions, because that seems like it's generally
- considered the way to go I guess.
- - *[[http://somethingaboutorange.com/mrl/projects/nose/1.0.0/][nose]]:* for unit tests, because it makes testing a bit nicer.
- - *[[http://celeryproject.org/][Celery]]:* for task queueing (think resizing images, encoding
- video) because some people like it, and even the people I know who
- don't don't seem to know of anything better :)
- - *[[http://www.rabbitmq.com/][RabbitMQ]]:* for sending tasks to celery, because I guess that's
- what most people do. Might be optional, might also let people use
- MongoDB for this if they want.
-
-** Why python
-
-Because I (Chris Webber) know Python, love Python, am capable of
-actually making this thing happen in Python (I've worked on a lot of
-large free software web applications before in Python, including
-[[http://mirocommunity.org/][Miro Community]], the [[http://miroguide.org][Miro Guide]], a large portion of
-[[http://creativecommons.org/][Creative Commons' site]], and a whole bunch of things while working at
-[[http://www.imagescape.com/][Imaginary Landscape]]). I know Python, I can make this happen in
-Python, me starting a project like this makes sense if it's done in
-Python.
-
-You might say that PHP is way more deployable, that rails has way more
-cool developers riding around on fixie bikes, and all of those things
-are true, but I know Python, like Python, and think that Python is
-pretty great. I do think that deployment in Python is not as good as
-with PHP, but I think the days of shared hosting are (thankfully)
-coming to an end, and will probably be replaced by cheap virtual
-machines spun up on the fly for people who want that sort of stuff,
-and Python will be a huge part of that future, maybe even more than
-PHP will. The deployment tools are getting better. Maybe we can use
-something like Silver Lining. Maybe we can just distribute as .debs
-or .rpms. We'll figure it out.
-
-But if I'm starting this project, which I am, it's gonna be in Python.
-
-** Why mongodb
-
-In case you were wondering, I am not a NOSQL fanboy, I do not go
-around telling people that MongoDB is web scale. Actually my choice
-for MongoDB isn't scalability, though scaling up really nicely is a
-pretty good feature and sets us up well in case large volume sites
-eventually do use MediaGoblin. But there's another side of
-scalability, and that's scaling down, which is important for
-federation, maybe even more important than scaling up in an ideal
-universe where everyone ran servers out of their own housing. As a
-memory-mapped database, MongoDB is pretty hungry, so actually I spent
-a lot of time debating whether the inability to scale down as nicely
-as something like SQL has with sqlite meant that it was out.
-
-But I decided in the end that I really want MongoDB, not for
-scalability, but for flexibility. Schema evolution pains in SQL are
-almost enough reason for me to want MongoDB, but not quite. The real
-reason is because I want the ability to eventually handle multiple
-media types through MediaGoblin, and also allow for plugins, without
-the rigidity of tables making that difficult. In other words,
-something like:
-
-#+BEGIN_SRC javascript
-{"title": "Me talking until you are bored",
- "description": "blah blah blah",
- "media_type": "audio",
- "media_data": {
- "length": "2:30",
- "codec": "OGG Vorbis"},
- "plugin_data": {
- "licensing": {
- "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"}}}
-#+END_SRC
-
-Being able to just dump media-specific information in a media_data
-hashtable is pretty great, and even better is having a plugin system
-where you can just let plugins have their own entire key-value space
-cleanly inside the document that doesn't interfere with anyone else's
-stuff. If we were to let plugins to deposit their own information
-inside the database, either we'd let plugins create their own tables
-which makes SQL migrations even harder than they already are, or we'd
-probably end up creating a table with a column for key, a column for
-value, and a column for type in one huge table called "plugin_data" or
-something similar. (Yo dawg, I heard you liked plugins, so I put a
-database in your database so you can query while you query.) Gross.
-
-I also don't want things to be too lose so that we forget or lose the
-structure of things, and that's one reason why I want to use MongoKit,
-because we can cleanly define a much structure as we want and verify
-that documents match that structure generally without adding too much
-bloat or overhead (mongokit is a pretty lightweight wrapper and
-doesn't inject extra mongokit-specific stuff into the database, which
-is nice and nicer than many other ORMs in that way).
-
-** Why wsgi minimalism / Why not Django
-
-If you notice in the technology list above, I list a lot of components
-that are very [[http://www.djangoproject.com/][Django-like]], but not actually Django components. What
-can I say, I really like a lot of the ideas in Django! Which leads to
-the question: why not just use Django?
-
-While I really like Django's ideas and a lot of its components, I also
-feel that most of the best ideas in Django I want have been
-implemented as good or even better outside of Django. I could just
-use Django and replace the templating system with Jinja2, and the form
-system with wtforms, and the database with MongoDB and MongoKit, but
-at that point, how much of Django is really left?
-
-I also am sometimes saddened and irritated by how coupled all of
-Django's components are. Loosely coupled yes, but still coupled.
-WSGI has done a good job of providing a base layer for running
-applications on and [[http://pythonpaste.org/webob/do-it-yourself.html][if you know how to do it yourself]] it's not hard or
-many lines of code at all to bind them together without any framework
-at all (not even say [[http://pylonshq.com/][Pylons]], [[http://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/pyramid/dev/][Pyramid]], or [[http://flask.pocoo.org/][Flask]] which I think are still
-great projects, especially for people who want this sort of thing but
-have no idea how to get started). And even at this already really
-early stage of writing MediaGoblin, that glue work is mostly done.
-
-Not to say I don't think Django isn't great for a lot of things. For
-a lot of stuff, it's still the best, but not for MediaGoblin, I think.
-
-One thing that Django does super well though is documentation. It
-still has some faults, but even with those considered I can hardly
-think of any other project in Python that has as nice of documentation
-as Django. It may be worth
-[[http://pycon.blip.tv/file/4881071/][learning some lessons on documentation from Django]], on that note.
-
-I'd really like to have a good, thorough hacking-howto and
-deployment-howto, especially in the former making some notes on how to
-make it easier for Django hackers to get started.
projects / mediagoblin.git / commitdiff