[GE-development] How much has been done?

[Robin Upton]

Russell Jelter wrote:
> How much development has been done on this project so far? Is it still
> mostly theoretical and waiting to be built, or is there a code base and
> everything being worked on right now?
>   
There is a stack of sub-projects as follows:

GE (Gift Economy)              = User interface, showing ME data and 
handling input.
ME (Meta-Evaluation)        = Summarising the AE data with a few key 
statistics
AE (Altruistic Economics)  = Mathematical decentralised accounting model
FF (Friend2Friend)             = The XML-VM, the personal data servers.

The deeper layers are the more complex, but also the more developed.

There is an FF implementation in PHP5, but this has 2 serious issues
a) Broken crypto -
    It was coded to follow W3C XML crypto, before I realised that their 
standard is both complex and broken,
    The fix is to extend their XML crypto standard or use an entirely 
different one.
b) Unreliability -
    It uses PHP5's XSLT library, which is built on LibXSLT, which has an 
issue with the XSL document() function that causes segmentation faults.
    PHP/LibXSLT team will probably not fix this bug, so the fix is to 
use a differnt XSL library

The latest version of source code should be available from 
http://friend2friend.net/docs/installation.

The online install of this code is not working due to a hosting issue, 
but it should work on localhost if you have a PHP5 capable webserver. It 
is OK for development of software modules (such as AE) but not yet 
reliable/secure enough for live use with real data.

Robin