Author here, I'm happy to answer any questions. Tibor
zupa
@zupa
Best posts made by zupa
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RE: Boomla
sorry I can't make sense of his post
Congratulations, you just passed the WTDWTF insanity test.
I wonder what a pass means
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RE: Boomla
@Maciejasjmj said in Boomla:
As for domains. boomla.com the project domain, boomla.net is for community websites. As in, if you shoot me an email I can set up an account for you, or in a couple of weeks you will be able to sign up and use any .boomla.net subdomain.
So let's say I take you up on your offer and put a website on there. A devlog, perhaps. It takes off, people love it, it's the new The Old New Thing, and everyone's amazed how nice the website software works.
Mr. Joe Developer sees that nice sleek website on
devlog.boomla.net
and thinks "Oooh, I want a website like this too! I wonder what that Boomla thing is!" So he does what he would on any other platform - he deletes the subdomain from the address bar and goes toboomla.net
, hoping for instructions about how to set his own website up.Instead, he gets slapped by this:
And you've just lost a user.
Bottom line is - put some banner here. Some blurb about what that "boomla" thing is, because if
boomla.net
as a community platform takes off, that's where people will be looking for information. Hell, even set up a redirect toboomla.com
, but don't slap a user with an error that makes "502 Bad Gateway" look user friendly.Good point, fixed, thx!
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RE: Boomla
@zupa If I'd consider buying your software, I'd have at least the following questions:
- Can I make a back-up of the data and restore it?
Yes. In Boomla, everything is a file, which you can connect to via FUSE, SFTP, or use the
boomla posix export
command to export your filesystem. Same goes for restoring, there is also aboomla posix import
command.- What if an exploitable security leak is found?
Right now Boomla is not to be considered secure at all. It's a toy, use it for anything where security is not an issue. It's great for blogs and content websites.
As for the future, same goes as for any other proprietary software. Let me turn this question. What do you expect from me?
- Can we realistically expect to get continued support for a long term and/or is there an easy way to get the data out and adapt the user-written apps to another platform?
An advantage of open-source is that the answer to these questions is generally "yes", because you have the fallback option of doing things yourself or hiring an independent consultant. With closed source, the vendor needs to have convincing answers. Especially for the support thing, big vendors like MS or Oracle have an advantage, simply because they are more likely than a startup to still exist 5 years from now.
As for long term support:
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I started working on Boomla in 2005. It started as a link collection site for my father and it evolved from there. I decided to turn it into a Website OS in 2008. I can't tell you how many times I was told this is not a one man project and I won't be able to build it. This is people's natural first reaction. But I love doing this and I won't quit, period.
The earliest proof I quickly found is 2012, note "Boomla is Windows for websites" in the top right. http://web.archive.org/web/20121107102447/http://dev.boomla.org/
The fact I've been doing this for long should lower your risk. -
If you look at my release log, you can see I was releasing continuously for almost a year. I started releasing exactly to boost your confidence I will be around. Really what I call v0 is v7, its only that the previous ones were only used internally.
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Now I have a part-time job as a consultant that makes me cash-flow positive. I still spend about 80 hours a week on Boomla. As it stands, my runway is infinite.
If that's not enough, you stand by watching and jump on the train once it reached your satisfaction. I would love to know where it stands.
Edited: remove irrelevant stuff.
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RE: Boomla
@blakeyrat said in Boomla:
learn problems of a concurrent environment - whatever it is,
"I don't know what problems these are, but trust me: Boomla solves them!"
Boomla is a simple platform for websites.
In Boomla, everything is a file, there is no database.
Ok... so it either has no dynamic content at all, or it performs like shit. (Or, possibly, it has insane race conditions that corrupt data! That'd be fun.)
Is a car fast? Is a filesystem fast? I wrote a filesystem that is faster than those you have experience with.
There are no processes, just files.
Uh. Huh.
Functional systems have no processes. Process is hidden state.
Forget Apache, there is a built in webserver that just works.
But it's not a process! Some...how!
Well, it's not a process within Boomla. It's one outside of its world. From within, you see no other processes, there is just you, a frozen world and you are doing your life synchronously.
Problems with Linux
The Linux filesystem is slow, not concurrency safe, not transactional, doesn’t support storing and searching structured data. Databases are used instead.
But, you're not using a database. You're using the filesystem. So...
As said, a new kind of FS.
Linux manages processes, provides isolated execution environments. The solution is really slow and processes are hard anyway. Websites require a fast, request-response like solution. Currently, website level apps are plain function calls. Isolation was traded for speed.
I guess it's time to switch to Windows/IIS, which offers both.
Interesting.
Linux provides a graphical user interface yet websites run in the browser.
The browser not being a graphical user interface. I... guess?
I wouldn't trust the clown who wrote this to put air in my tires, much less host my websites.The browser is a GUI, but the GUI visitors see is coded by site developers and not provided by Linux.
As for clown, I do like juggling and stuff. -
RE: Boomla
@ben_lubar Can't tell, the go ssh library implements both a client and a server.
And as for Fuse - my guess is that their claims about a file system with built in versioning and branching really do mean that they implemented their own file system, inside an image file, accessible to the server-side Javascript programs through Fuse.
Nice detective work! The first part is correct. FUSE is used for accessing the files from your Unix host OS. Same goes for SFTP, which is the bridge for Windows - that's what SSH is used for. When you program Boomla, your code within has native access to the filesystem, no FUSE or similar is needed there. As for their claim, it's just me.
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RE: Boomla
@AlexMedia said in Boomla:
What's the story behind the name "Boomla"? It makes me think of a website that offers silly games to kids.
Boomla inherited the domain and thus the name from earlier projects. I first got boomla.net as the com was taken, which I later got lucky to buy on an auction. A good domain is quite hard to get so it was a no-brainer.
Well, isn't it offering a silly game for kids?
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RE: Boomla
Nope, this is an OS redesign from scratch.
Seems like a task well-suited to a one man team.
I like challenges.
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RE: Boomla
@zupa @SpectateSwamp had or has similar ideas of doing stuff generaly done with a database without a database. He got a lot of criticism for that but stood for this. I'm also curious how similar your views are.
@antiquarian @clippy @Tsaukpaetra - sorry I can't make sense of his post.
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RE: Boomla
@Tsaukpaetra said in Boomla:
Author here, I'm happy to answer any questions. Tibor
Hey there! If you mention whoever invited you here, they get a !
I searched "boomla" 'cause why not, and found a screenshot of its front page in the images section. I guess, thumbs up Google :)
Latest posts made by zupa
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RE: Boomla
@zupa Your choice of not opensourcing it for now is a sound one. you may get your product in a state where its really good for a niche and get paid for it, for example.
Trying to compete directly with wordpress would be bad.
I think you'll end going to something similar to genexus.
thx clippy
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RE: Boomla
sorry I can't make sense of his post
Congratulations, you just passed the WTDWTF insanity test.
I wonder what a pass means
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RE: Boomla
@zupa So, basically, no it is not free for anyone who would actually use it the way you want them to. One website per server for free? Good luck pitching that to web shops/agencies, I can run as many (for example) Wordpress instances as I want on my servers and I don't have to pay them anything. I also get the added bonus of being able to hire people who know Wordpress already, no training required.
So, I would have to pay but your value proposition is.. what, exactly? That it's fast? That isn't a concern anymore. What else you got?
Ah I think the answer I gave sounded too decided. Figuring out how to monetize this was so far the smallest problem I had. I wanted to first make the product attractive than worry about monetizing it later. The current license states it's free and I can't take the license back from you. I really wanted to worry about this a bit later.
As you say the most imporant thing for now is to show you what Boomla brings to the table. But I can't just tell, I have to show you, because telling doesn't quite cut it.
In short it saves you time and gives you more power but that sounds meaningless. Soon you will be able to experience from your browser, with very little effort. Let me get to that point first.
If you want to give me a chance to convince you, please subscribe to the mailing list or shoot me a mail to thalter at boomla com and you'll be messaged when the time has come. We are talking few months.
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RE: Boomla
@pydsigner said in Boomla:
@zupa To be fair, it's not exactly a well-written, sensical post.
is there one?
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RE: Boomla
@zupa @SpectateSwamp had or has similar ideas of doing stuff generaly done with a database without a database. He got a lot of criticism for that but stood for this. I'm also curious how similar your views are.
@antiquarian @clippy @Tsaukpaetra - sorry I can't make sense of his post.
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RE: Boomla
@Tsaukpaetra said in Boomla:
@antiquarian said in Boomla:
@zupa What do you think of his approach to software development? I'm curious about your opinion.
is this a joke?
I don't think so. I'm also interested in your opinion.
Great, than pls rephrase the question in a form without external dependencies.
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RE: Boomla
@antiquarian said in Boomla:
@zupa What do you think of his approach to software development? I'm curious about your opinion.
is this a joke?
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RE: Boomla
@antiquarian said in Boomla:
No, I just landed here, well, today in my timezone. Should I meet him? Can you elaborate?
Enjoy.
Care to elaborate? I'm clueless why you are pointing me there. :/
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RE: Boomla
@antiquarian said in Boomla:
This is one usecase for sure, other times you need all fancy features. You will be able to embed anything. I didn't expect people will find this by now, lots are not explained, all coming.
Have you met @SpectateSwamp ?
No, I just landed here, well, today in my timezone. Should I meet him? Can you elaborate?
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RE: Boomla
Do people still pay for website CMS'? The only ones I've seen that do are people who had proprietary classic ASP sites built years ago by one man companies that change exorbitant annual fees for "licensing". I only see them because those people come to the companies I work for so we can build them new websites without the pointless licensing fees.
I want to make Boomla freemium. In the end, you still need to pay for hosting, I hope to monetize that to support development. If you want to host it on your own server, as it stands you will be able to host 1 website per server for free. I assume not everyone will want to manage their own infrastructure.
Also, I plan to host open source websites for free. That's useful because you will be able to save a website for reference, use offline, collaborate, etc.