Hi, I see it more as improving the way things work (aka progress). To answer your question:
What Qworum is, in a gist
Qworum intends to improve developer productivity by defining a module system for web applications. JavaScript already has NPM, which saves developers countless hours because devs can simply use the JS modules that others have made available. And that’s exactly what Qworum does, but for web applications.
Example
Imagine an e-commerce webapp that needs a shopping cart. The developers start implementing the cart until one of them says: “Hey, did you see that shopping cart Qworum service on https://my-shopping-cart.example ? Let’s use that, and we don’t even need to copy any code over to our site, a remote call is enough !”
Repeat this scenario for a contacts list, a todo list etc and see how much your productivity is improved by using not only remote Qworum services but also local ones.
REST-Qworum comparison
Perhaps comparing Qworum with REST can help understand how Qworum works.
A Qworum service is comparable to a REST API in that it has a set of end-points. A Qworum end-point in turn is similar to a REST end-point in that it has a URL and it receives (optional) data and returns some data.
But the big difference compared to REST is that Qworum end-points are not obliged to return a result immediately. In other words, a Qworum end-point call can involve more than one HTTP(S) request-response pair. So Qworum can return 2 types of responses during a call:
HTML pages for interacting with the end-user,
Qworum scripts for making nested calls to other end-points (recursion is also supported), and for returning a result to end the call. Qworum scripts can be sent as XML to the browser, or they can be generated in web pages on the browser using JavaScript.
Why can’t the server do all the intermediate requests server-side? What’s the benefit of doing it in the user’s browser?
For example, Stripe provides UI libraries/components for making payments. They also provide an API. It also can talk to other APIs to do its thing (e.g. banks to make payouts, or IRS or whatever to manage taxes).
So all of this is already possible and done. What benefits does Qworum provide?
Indeed Qworum will be a freemium commercial product, but using Qworum to modularise your webapps will always be free.
I think going commercial will help put the right amount of energy behind this project, that’s why I am choosing that route. At least part of the code base is/will be open source.
I’m not quite sure what problem it’s trying to solve.
Hi, I see it more as improving the way things work (aka progress). To answer your question:
What Qworum is, in a gist
Qworum intends to improve developer productivity by defining a module system for web applications. JavaScript already has NPM, which saves developers countless hours because devs can simply use the JS modules that others have made available. And that’s exactly what Qworum does, but for web applications.
Example
Imagine an e-commerce webapp that needs a shopping cart. The developers start implementing the cart until one of them says: “Hey, did you see that shopping cart Qworum service on https://my-shopping-cart.example ? Let’s use that, and we don’t even need to copy any code over to our site, a remote call is enough !”
Repeat this scenario for a contacts list, a todo list etc and see how much your productivity is improved by using not only remote Qworum services but also local ones.
REST-Qworum comparison
Perhaps comparing Qworum with REST can help understand how Qworum works.
A Qworum service is comparable to a REST API in that it has a set of end-points. A Qworum end-point in turn is similar to a REST end-point in that it has a URL and it receives (optional) data and returns some data.
But the big difference compared to REST is that Qworum end-points are not obliged to return a result immediately. In other words, a Qworum end-point call can involve more than one HTTP(S) request-response pair. So Qworum can return 2 types of responses during a call:
Is this response working ok for you?
I still struggle to see the value proposition.
Why can’t the server do all the intermediate requests server-side? What’s the benefit of doing it in the user’s browser?
For example, Stripe provides UI libraries/components for making payments. They also provide an API. It also can talk to other APIs to do its thing (e.g. banks to make payouts, or IRS or whatever to manage taxes).
So all of this is already possible and done. What benefits does Qworum provide?
Is this intended to be for a commercial product? Or are the specification and open source deliverables toe ultimate goal of this project?
Answer from author: https://mastodon.social/web/@dogaar/108995140973346389
Indeed Qworum will be a freemium commercial product, but using Qworum to modularise your webapps will always be free.
I think going commercial will help put the right amount of energy behind this project, that’s why I am choosing that route. At least part of the code base is/will be open source.
Always interested to hear feedback from devs.
Hi @xojoc, thanks for quoting me and for inviting me on lobste.rs.