Beaker

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Beaker is a discontinued browser supporting the Hypercore protocol, and notable as an example of making non-HTTP "distributed" protocols more user-friendly.

History

The v1.0 beta was announced 2020-05-14

• 2020-05-14 Paul Frazee: Announcing the Beaker 1.0 Beta (archived)

Before v1.0, Beaker relied on the Dat protocol, use of which has been limited to read-only.

• 2021-09-10 Paul Frazee: I'm going to be closing down this project [...] (archived) announced the discontinuation of Beaker:

  I'm going to be closing down this project in the very near future. I'll do a post mortem and share more, but in the intro to my follow-on project I do give a few words on why I felt it was time to change the approach: https://atek.cloud/blog/hello-world

• 2021-09-09 Paul Frazee: Hello, world (archived) talks a little more about Beaker (in the past tense):

  The challenge was that Beaker apps had no backend. If you want to build 100% client-side SPAs, you need something akin to a Firebase: a toolkit of databases, users/identity, and networking. We took a lot of shots at building that, but struggled to create APIs which matched the browser's security and page-based runtime model. Having to create a single monolithic stack for everybody to use is difficult, and ran against many people's expectations of what a browser is and is supposed to do. A home cloud is a more natural fit for this.

• 2022-12-27 Paul Frazee: Beaker Browser is now archived (archived)

Applications

• beakermentions

See Also

• Hypercore protocol
• 2017/Intros#Jim_Pick
• 2017/Demos#Jim_Pick
• Greg McVerry forked 2017/Demos#Jim_Pick to make a proper h-entry dat page and is working on a dat page h-card generator. [dat://6fb4b6e4658dcdbf162b4133d0be7ced5e3da2330471e9caea5a0f9d7c871689/]
• Dat