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Mozilla-Based Open Source Project Needs Volunteer Programmers

by BRAD NEUBERG | Are you unemployed (like me) but interested in hacking and creating some cool software?

Are you fascinated by open-source and peer-to-peer programming?

Interested in maybe making a splash in how the web itself operates?

Paper Airplane is a new web browser that empowers people to easily create collaborative communities without setting up servers or spending money. It does this by integrating a web server into the browser itself, including tools to create collaborative online communities that are stored on the machine. Web sites are stored locally on a user's machine. A peer network is created between all of the web servers running within the Paper Airplane browsers that are running. This peer network does a variety of things; first, it helps to forward requests to web servers that may be running behind firewalls or NATs, allowing users to host and create collaborative communities on their machines where in the past they would not have been able to due to network filtering. Second, the peer network creates an alternative domain name system to the existing one, allowing users to freely use hundreds of new domain endings, such as .politics, .environment, .love, .name, .crush, .marryme, .laborpolicy, .gay, and more.

Paper Airplane has taken an unusual approach from other open source projects. First, we did over six months of usability testing with almost a hundred mockups to ensure that the system was easy to use. Second, we hired a professional graphic designer (Hoang Dinh at www.lucaspapaya.com) to create a beautiful looking piece of software and brand identity.

The following technologies are being used to build Paper Airplane:
  • Mozilla and the Mozilla framework (www.mozilla.org) — Mozilla is not just a web browser; it is also a full-fledged framework for creating cross-platform applications using standard-web technologies. Paper Airplane is using these technologies, such as an XML-based tag language for describing user-interfaces called XUL, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript, and more.
  • JXTA (www.jxta.org) — JXTA is a framework for creating peer-to-peer applications; it solves some of the hard aspects of creating a p2p app, such as reaching unreachable peers behind firewalls and NATs.
  • Java — JXTA is written in Java, so much of the back-end network portions of the system will also be written in Java.
Since Paper Airplane is a non-commercial group of volunteers, we have no money to offer, but we can offer fame and glory! :) If this project excites you, email Brad Neuberg at bkn3@columbia.edu with a short blurb about your background, technologies, and time availablility.

Got a response? TalkBack!


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