Solid Discussion App (SDA) is a client web application that allows users to have discussions in a Solid environment :
Solid (derived from "social linked data") is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles. Solid is modular and extensible and it relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards and protocols. source
To use the application users must have a Solid pod. You can have a free one at solid.community. However some features as read / write in a public conversation doesn't need a Solid pod.
SDA is written with React from create-react-app and follows redux principles.
The design follows Material Design principles.
A user can authenticate himself with his WebID :
The WebID 1.0 (Web Identity and Discovery) standard is used to provide universal usernames/IDs for Solid apps, and to refer to unique Agents (people, organizations, devices). source
The app display the name and the avatar of the connected user if data are fulfilled.
The app recover the previous session.
The app uses solid-auth-client library to handle authentication with a Solid server such as node-solid-server. The library completely abstracts the complexity of authenticating a user and handle the session.
Once the user is authenticated we load data about the user via his WebId profile in turtle format and parse it with the rdflib library to extract his foaf:name and his foaf:img.
Done
A user can create a new discussion on his pod.
The user must give a name to the conversation.
The user choices the path where to store the conversation on his pod.
Warning : This story is over-simplistic. In order to preserve interoperability between client applications a strategy to determine a default location should be applied using solid:TypeRegistration (see the spec). However I couldn't figure out how to fit it in my use case so for now the user choose a location by hand which is a pretty bad UX. I think further reflexion and discussion on this topic need to be done by the Solid community.
The app uses the SIOC Core Ontology Specification to modelize business data (discussion, messages, participants, etc.). Other vocabularies will be implemented later.
The class sioc:Thread is used to represent a discussion.
Doing
Once a discussion is created the user can invite other people to participate by sending them an invitation with an appropriate link. The user can only add members to a discussion he owns.
To do