[Thali-talk] FireChat and meshy happiness

[Yaron Goland]

One of Thali's goals going way back was to get local ad-hoc networking meshes to work. For various reasons we hadn't gotten as far there as I would have liked but thanks to the IoT focus it's now really important again. This led me to wonder about FireChat which I heard ran reasonably well on Android. I wanted to see how well its discovery and ad-hoc connectivity really worked so I ran some experiments whose results I recount at http://thaliproject.org/ExperimentWithFireChat

The bottom line is - it works pretty well. No ugly user notifications (e.g. no Bluetooth or WiFi notifications from the OS).

This is an obvious existence proof that we should be able to write a pretty awesome node.js library that can run on Android, iOS and WinRT and allow them to all mesh together. At first it will just be basic discovery and point to point communication. But over time we will support relay based meshes (e.g. sync store A from device D1 to D2 and then at some later point sync store A from D2 to D3) but eventually we'll want stream based meshes as well (e.g. open a TCP connection or equivalent from device D1 relayed through D2 to D3).

               Yaron
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