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by portalplatform 3960 days ago
We're already working with some developers to make personal cloud server apps and really want to encourage more developers to start. There are thousands of apps that need to be written and it's a lot more fun than working in propriety mobile environments!

And it's not just about writing "Portal apps", we want every app that runs on Portal to also run on competing personal cloud server platforms. That's what true decentralization requires.
1 comments
ocdtrekkie 3960 days ago
So, have you looked into how Sandstorm packages files, and whether one of your JSON manifests could be easily added next to a Sandstorm package in order to run it? Or, oppositely, could your platform install an app based on a provided SPK file (and it's own built-in manifest)?

The biggest difference is that it looks like you have people include a script to install the app, and Sandstorm packages the app and all it's dependencies 'pre-installed', and is mostly independent of Linux flavor.

Since Sandstorm packages have all the dependencies and app data in read-only, and all of the user's app data in /var, I would think it'd be relatively possible to figure out how to get the two formats to play nice.

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portalplatform 3960 days ago
I haven't looked at Sandstorm packages in detail yet. I think it definitely should be possible to make a Sandstorm-runner app for Portal. I've experimented with doing this for Docker. It should also be possible to run a full copy of Sandstorm (or more than one) as a Portal app VM. We'll support any and all standards that emerge.

For now, we're just trying to keep it really simple and the JSON config seems as simple as we can make it. Apps could do a lot more, like include their own OS images or rootfs tarballs if it makes sense.

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ocdtrekkie 3960 days ago
My thoughts on running Sandstorm in an app on a server that runs apps is similar to my thoughts on running ownCloud on Sandstorm. There's definitely uses, to be able to use features the parent app platform doesn't support (Sandstorm doesn't do everything ownCloud does yet), but running an app platform inside an app platform is sometimes silly. (Though it's probably relatively trivial to run Sandstorm inside Portal Platform.)

Though running individual Sandstorm apps as individual Portal Platform apps is probably also doable, since SPKs contain everything a Linux server needs to run an app. Sandstorm and Portal Platform manifests are pretty similar, and the way the apps are run are similar.

My thought here is just that if your 'install' script can unpack and set up from an SPK file, you might be able to take advantage of some of the apps already being published (currently) exclusively for Sandstorm.

I've been poking around Windows' SDKs to turn iOS and Android apps and stuff into Windows apps, so the concept of this sort of thing happens to be fresh in my head currently. :D

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