It's a great concept. Question - why not just use CouchDB? We've been doing similar app platform stuff with it for years. Check out this wiki that is hosted directly out of CouchDB, with no other server side component: http://couchapp.org
I must admit that I'm not very familiar with CouchDB. From what I have read think there are a lot of similarities - and with the same goal of building complete web apps using only client-side JavaScript.
Pageforest has a focus on building a multi-tenant application hub. I think of it as kind of
distributed Google Docs infrastructure:
- Users' data is stored in a unified document store that is owned by the user. They can
view and manage all their "documents" created from applications from one place.
- They can use their Pageforest account to grant permissions to each application they
want to use to write into their document store.
BTW - Pageforest is currently hosted as a Google AppEngine app - so it picks up the scalability
benefits of BigTable with a datacenter managed by Google.
I'm surprised to see a suggestion of CouchDB - with the deep integration of BigTable with App Engine, I think it'd be unnecessarily hard to use anything else.
PageForest uses App Engine to provide a key value storage API with user authentication. CouchDB has these out-of-the-box, so a CouchDB version should be much less code than this version. Not to mention all the things Couch supports that would be a major challenge to implement within App Engine.
Er, well CouchDB is kind of a different animal and is very far from supporting the kind of development workflow he's doing. CouchApp is very, very cool but very different and saying that things like this have been done is kind of pointless - web apps have been written in _everything_.
I get ya - sorta. I do think we are running headlong into NoSQL 2.0, where everyone ends up writing very similar but incompatible HTTP accessible key/value stores. Seems like a waste to plow energy into writing web-based key value stores when there are already plenty of good ones.
Pageforest is a pretty thin wrapper on top of a AppEngine's BigTable implementation. It does have to add things like a user accounts, user permissions, and caching layer.
The client library (JavaScript) is also design to make it very easy to write "single-page" web apps. You basically just need to write a setDoc() and getDoc() function to persist your document as a JSON blob in storage.
etherpad was awesome! Difference here is that the app lives client-side - and uses a "generic" server implementation for user authentication, storage, and push notifications.
