What do end users need to consume hApps?

Technical Discussion App Deployment
#1

Just a point of clarification on deployment. If someone writes an hApp, what does an end user need to do to consume the app?

#2

I think https://holochain-open-dev.github.io/blog/how-to-ship-your-happ/ is what I was looking for.

#3

Hi @nhardt
I’m the author of that linked article, I’m around the forums a lot.
That may give you a rough picture, it’s also a bit out of date though. In particular I would dismiss the Holoscape parts of the article.

If you find links to Acorn, they may or may not have functioning versions of the software, as certain system components may be unmaintained at the moment. If youre interested in the upcoming definitely working end user application though you can join our Acorn waitlist, which has a very short term release target where we would reach out :slight_smile:

https://forms.gle/854P2BtvesUSovH48

If you’ve got other curiosities ask away.
Connor

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#4

Is the long term deployment plan that the holo network will function as a distributed cloud and most end users are downloading/installing apps that then talk to that network via websockets? Or is the model more something where every end user has a device that participates as a node in the network, where they store their data locally first then publish to a set of peers for redundancy?

#5

https://holochain-gym.github.io/developers/basic/entries/#creating-an-entry This makes sense to me, as far as writing locally first then getting some witnesses to authenticate the data is from me.

I guess the long term deployment thing I’m wondering about is how to deliver an app to a non-technical user. Let’s say I wanted to make a “my favorite number” app where I could update my favorite number and my friends could see it. If I have a friend that only mostly is on mobile, and a friend that only runs Windows, and one that only has a Mac, how would they check to see what my current number is? I’ll try to figure this out but I’m happy to have help with a direct answer.

#6

Just to round this out, most of my questions were answered here: https://developer.holochain.org/what-is-holochain/

You can write a UI for your application using any language, framework, and runtime you choose, as long as it can run on your users’ devices and send MessagePack-encoded RPC calls over WebSocket to the user’s locally running Holochain service.

When you’re architecting your application and writing code, the most important thing to know is that all code is modelled from the perspective of the end-user because both the back end and front end run on the user’s device.

#7

Hi Conner,
I’m going back around and re-reading the written material and resources. Everything I was trying to ask was answered in your original article, but I didn’t know enough at the time of reading it to understand it. Thank you for the article and taking the time to reply.

Nate

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