Make hosting atomic data as easy as possible

[joepio]

Atomic Data is all about data ownership and control. To do this, we need to make it as easy as possible to host an atomic server somewhere. That's one of the reasons I've picked rust as a language - it compiles to pretty much any target, including WASM. But if we really want to achieve maximum adoption, we need to eliminate as much barriers as possible. There are various approaches to this problem:

Server ease of use

Make it as simple as possible to run and setup atomic-server. Eliminate as much mental energy and time required from the setup process. Make it compatible with most machines. Eliminate runtime dependencies. Provide several options that people are familiar with. Use sensible defaults instead of asking too many questions.

• Docker support Dockerfile for atomic-server #69
• Docker ARM support Docker image for arm #80
• Atomic-Server compiles to ARM
• Publish pre-built binaries for various targets (this is currently a manual process)
• Publish to stores (brew / snap / mac app store / windows store / whatever) Adding bundles for desktop OSes  #117
• GUI all the things
  • Tray icon for desktop Add tray icon for server #75
  • Zero-CLI setup (open browser, enter form, you're done) Bundle / package / distribute as desktop app with tauri #215
• Getting rid of port-forwarding - consider using tunnels / centralized subdomain system #152

Cloudflare Workers + KV

Cloudflare has this really interesting product, called Workers, which lets you run JS and WASM in a serverless context. This means it is way easier to manage than a VPS. It offers storage using KV, which has no native support for Rust ATM, although it can be accessed using wasm-bindgen.

The logic currently present in Atomic-Server is kept as minimal as possible (most resides in atomic-lib), and could probably made in Cloudflare Workers, judging from this todo example.

Running Atomic-Server on a smartphone

#25

Most people have an old smartphone in a drawer somewhere. These are powerful enough to run atomic-server. So first, we need some way of running it on smartphones. I'd rather not create new swift / java apps for both iOS and android platforms, so I prefer running the existing stuff on Android.

Luckily, atomic-server does compile to arm. This should open some possibilities. Couple of ideas:

• Run linux on android (using gnuroot)
• Using the android JNI interface to interface java - rust.
• Using flutter + wasm. Would be ideal (just one codebase to maintain, both for UI and server). Still requires a solution to actix not having WASI compatibility, though.

[joepio]

tauri is an interesting new way of packaging / bundling desktop apps.

Most relevant for browser front-ends, though, so atomic-data-browser in this case.

Edit: have been working on this see #215

[joepio]

Closing this in favor of the milestone https://github.com/joepio/atomic-data-rust/milestone/1