[tor-talk] Shutting down the relay-search service by the end of the year

[Karsten Loesing]

On 1/7/14 2:29 PM, Christian wrote:
> On 07.01.2014 13:44, Karsten Loesing wrote:
>> On 1/7/14 1:32 PM, Christian wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> sorry for the late answer.
>>>
>>> On 30.12.2013 16:53, Arlo Breault wrote:
>>>> I wrote a little proof of concept rendering globe server-side with phantom.js
>>>> https://github.com/makepanic/globe/pull/42
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sunday, December 29, 2013 at 1:42 AM, Karsten Loesing wrote:
>>>>
>>>
>>> I like this idea but don't know what the better approach would be.
>>>
>>> Is the plan to avoid a JavaScript client side implementation as a
>>> relay/bridge search service or just provide a fallback for users that
>>> have JavaScript disabled?
>>
>> I guess whatever works in browsers that don't have JavaScript is fine.
>>
>> I'm unclear what the difference between your two options is.  Does the
>> second option check whether the user has JavaScript enabled or disabled
>> and return a different website, and does the first always return the
>> website that requires no JavaScript?
> 
> The implementation by Arlo uses phantomjs (http://phantomjs.org/) to
> render the current globe url in a headless browser and puts it inside
> the <noscript> element.
> 
> If the user has JavaScript enabled the noscript element is hidden and
> the browser uses the clientside JavaScript for routing, templating and
> onionoo requests.
> 
> If the user has JavaScript disabled, the clientside JavaScript code will
> not execute and the content of <noscript> is visible.
> 
> Arlo changed the routing behavior of Emberjs to use the history-api
> which allows routing without the hashchange event (/#/top10 becomes
> /top10 in browsers that support it http://caniuse.com/history ).
> 
> This means that if the user without JavaScript wants to see another view
> he has to start a new requests and phantomjs renders the new page and
> the server returns the html.
> The user with JavaScript enabled uses the clientside templates and can
> continue without a request.
> 
> In the end they both of them see the same output but the user without
> JavaScript has to start a new requests if he wants to see another view.
> 
> Please correct me if I'm wrong Arlo.
> 
>>
>> What's the easiest for you to maintain?
> 
> I'm not sure but the phantomjs implementation requires less amount of
> work to provide a JavaScript free way to search bridges and relays. We
> only have to make some minor changes (expand the advances search by
> default, fix fontawesome icons, ...).
> Another advantage is that we can continue to use the current test/build
> setup.

It seems that most things in Globe could work just fine without
client-side JavaScript.  The only problem might be bandwidth and weights
graphs.  How does Arlo's version display graphs?

However, I just looked at Debian's package search page, and there's no
phantomjs in wheezy nor wheezy-backports.  That means we probably can't
run it on a Tor machine. :(

What's the alternative?  Use Globe's current codebase and turn it into
something that runs in nodejs, which is contained in wheezy-backports?

Thanks!

All the best,
Karsten