Hacker News Reader

Comment by formula1 | Hacker News Reader

Im not reading anything about opening ports on your routers firewall. Does this somehow circumvent this? Reading it further it seems to explicitly say "local" which probably implies you.ip.address.[0-255] is targeted.

I think this technology is intriguing and with some real use cases (more peer to peer) but the api seems disorganized. I cant tell if it wants to be another webstandard or be something different.

A part of me wants to dislike this and consider it as a distasteful competitor to pre-existing technologies that have learned to survive without "the web". Another part realizes that sandboxing these technologies protects and enables the average user in regards to awesome tech. This certainly wont replace torrent, webrtc or other existing p2p technology. But I certainly think its a cute way of opening up the field.

View on HN

From what I can tell, it's for localized apps within say, your home network. Imagine being able to start a game and other people not need to download anything to join. Your phone announces it, they open their browser, see a list of Flyweb apps and connect to your game (like in the car racing demo video up further in the comments).

The thing that I worry about though, is that you're starting a local web server from within your browser. I feel like they're some big security concerns that should be addressed in like the opening paragraph.

Also that red background for their website is terrible. :-P

It mentions that it relies on mDNS (Multicast DNS) which is link-local (for the most part).

It might be nice if it could be configured to also leverage a DHT like the Bittorrent DHT such as Webtorrent uses, but that may be out of scope. (From what I guess, restricting it to link-local may possibly be an intended restriction for now.)

Hosting HTTP from JS is nice (and potentially quite useful in p2p/mesh/offline-first worlds), but the real proposed benefit here would be adding a first class mDNS UX to the web browser. Right now anybody can host a web server and mDNS advertise on a local network, but there's no cross-platform, cross-browser way for me to tell you how to pull up that mDNS advertised web server. On some systems, some of the time, in some of the browsers you can use mdns-name.local and access that server. But a lot of system/browser combo don't support that (or worse, don't support that reliably). (Not to mention the questions of how to access mDNS advertised names that don't meet URL standards such as are full of : and space and Unicode characters.) If FlyWeb could help get something of a standardized web browser interface into mDNS, that alone would be a whole lot of good for the intranet/link-local/IoT web.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com