This is an experimental project to create a publishing/workgroup server in modern C++. There are various goals:
- Be as fast as possible! Page loads should be almost instantaneous.
- Explore data structures in C++ to support this goal. No database will be used; rather just in-memory structures and the filesystem for storage.
- Explore features and usability ideas that other solutions don't provide. Innovate!
- Show that modern C++ is a fine web development language and has all the great features of the newfangled languages.
Nothing yet. A bit of basic structure code. You won't use it anytime soon.
Goals include, from highest priority to crazy "maybe someday" ideas:
- Blog
- Photo gallery
- Discussion forums (adding discussion to the above)
- Notifications that expire when appropriate
- Realtime chat
- Federation to other sites
- Wiki
- Scrum board
There is an itch I've been wanting to scratch for a long time. Corporate communications largely suck in that the same message is posted in many different places, and often people have to deal with it even after it expires.
The notification system mentioned above will allow a post to a hierarchy of users you specify (for example, those in Texas), and expiring either at a specific date or expire-on-demand. For example, say you need a ride to the airport. With a mailing list, you'd send the request by email, you'd get an offer, and then people on future shifts will still see and have to delete the email. Here, you remove it as soon as you have the offer, saving everyone else time.
Something I want to do in the photo gallery is have an annotation feature. For each photo, it should be possible to write snippets of text that point to specific spots on the photo, and the viewer would be able to move back and forth through the annotations.
I want to see more innovation like that. Bring your ideas!
It is built on:
- Drogon, the C++ web framework
- Facebook Folly, for fast algorithms
It will run in a single multithreaded process. Yes, I know this is very much unlike the microservice architecture that most things are headed towards. That's OK.
There will be a write log for durability.
Whenever anything is updated (forum post or whatever), the in-memory structure will be modified first. Then the write log is updated. Finally, the on-disk structure for the thing will be lazily updated.
The log will be shipable to other sites for a warm standby in case of primary node failure. It will also be used to federate portions of the site to other z2wow installations. For example, a single discussion forum may be shared among 5 different z2wow sites.
Users and groups will be able to be placed in different hierarchies; for example by location (everyone in US -> everyone in Texas -> everyone in San Antonio), or by department (Operations -> Support), or however you want.
Most "cloudy" applications scale horizontally with many load-balanced nodes. This is different in that the architecture allows only one active node. Scalability will thus be vertical: If you need more power, you need a bigger computer! However, you can buy or build with commodity parts a server with up to 1TB of RAM, 64 CPU cores, and many terabytes of storage. It will be a while before this is validated, but I believe such a setup should easily serve an organization with hundreds of thousands of users, with at least tens of thousands active at the same time. Especially given that we're writing in C++ with an explicit goal of optimization.
Because z2wow.com was available. :) And it's pretty easy to remember. I hope it also implies speed. Really, what name these days does mean much? :/
I'd love to see a coding community build around this. If that happens, I don't think reaching all the stated features will be a stretch. I'd be willing to help mentor.
All contributions shall be licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later and owned by their respective contributors, thus guaranteeing that the license will never change, and will not be assimilated into some proprietary product without changes being put back in the open, sort of like the Linux kernel.
If you want to hire me to work on it full time, I'm yoderm at gmail. Hit me up. :D
Coming soon... Though if you know how to use CMake, and install Drogon and Folly, you're about there.
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent