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beakerbrowser / unwalled.garden

Schemas for a p2p social-media network built on the Dat Web.
MIT License
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Add the API #4

Closed pfrazee closed 5 years ago

pfrazee commented 5 years ago

This PR adds a Web API. In reality, the API module (index.js) is a thin wrapper around Beaker's builtins. Here is the explanation included in the file's header:

Why does this exist?

The Web platform community is still deciding how to build a "standard library" which can be imported by ES modules. As part of the Extensible Web Manifesto, a goal for an stdlib is to use shim solutions which can smoothly upgrade to native Web APIs if/when they are adopted. In that spirit, the Beaker team wanted a solution for its new Web APIs that wasn't just a new set of builtin global objects. By wrapping the navigator.importSystemAPI() call in this shim, we gave ourselves some freedom to adopt the future stdlib solutions.

Why are these APIs implemented in the browser?

The existing Web APIs for running unwalled.garden's database are not suitable enough for our goals. We gave it a shot (see https://github.com/beakerbrowser/libfritter) and found that indexeddb couldn't perform the way we needed. Rather than try to create new database primitives, we decided to build high-level APIs into the browser directly. By having consumers import from this wrapper, we left open the possibility that these APIs could move into userland.

pfrazee commented 5 years ago

This PR only adds the feed and followgraph APIs. More APIs will be added in the future (and these two APIs will be expanded over time).