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[ANN] Fafi, a Racket-based client

Luke Emmet luke at marmaladefoo.com

Tue Aug 18 09:39:36 BST 2020

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Hi Andre

thanks for your reply

On 16-Aug-2020 18:24, Andre Garzia wrote:

I took a tour of Gemini Browsers and saw that your browser had REBOL

code in it and that made me smile. I used to work with REBOL in the

early 2000s and it is a language that is very dear to my heart. I

think that a Gemini browser using Red should be a fantastic project,

maybe I'll try that as well.

Yes REBOL/Red is very nice, but largely under-appreciated, and somewhat niche now I suppose.

A Red client would be cool - I think the TLS is WIP in Red, but apparently it is being developed. There is also a fork of REBOL which is being actively maintained and seems to include TLS. I've not investigated it much yet though.

https://github.com/Oldes/Rebol3

As for Firefox OS, that is a little flame in my heart that will never

be extinguished, I really liked it and still do. I think that a client

is possible but you won't be able to support all the status codes and

use cases as you won't be able to generate certificates (unless you

write a pure JS TLS implementation). I'm not sure which version of

OpenSSL KaiOS is linked against but you should be able to open a raw

TCP secure socket to port 1965 and read and write from it using

"mozTCPSocket":

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/B2G_OS/API/TPC_Socket_API

Another thing that put a smile on me was the surprise I got when I was

researching to write the reply to you (it has been a while since I

last touched FirefoxOS code). If I remember correctly in 2013 I took

some time adding FirefoxOS samples to MDN and the sample linked to

that article is a Telnet client I wrote:

https://github.com/soapdog/firefoxos-sample-app-telnet-client

You should be able to pick that telnet client and just tweak it a

little to test it against a Gemini server. Be aware that KaiOS has a

different keyboard based navigation system and you'll need to check

their dev docs:

https://developer.kaiostech.com/

I don't have any KaiOS device but I am intrigued by it. Some months

ago I had a meeting with their DevRel to talk about the old days of

FirefoxOS and how community was handled and encouraged, it was a fun

meeting and I hope they are investing more in building a community now.

Thanks for these links - I shall add this to my todo list and investigate further. It would be interesting to see how far it can go. I think the client generated certificates is only a minor limitation, as the overwhelming majority of content in geminispace is freely accessible.

Best Wishes

- Luke