Peers.me federation

May 3, 2011 by richard

With the latest update the Peers.me domain is exposed in your wave address, eg. richard is now richard@company. These are the first steps towards federation between Peers.me domains.

What is federation? In may 2009 Google announced Google Wave, a service for online realtime collaboration. With the announcement, Google introduced the Wave Federation Protocol. This protocol is designed for realtime communication between servers. As of day one, we’ve been working on our own wave server to support group communication. We’ve always thought the federation protocol could be very useful for our clients.

Peers.me internal federation

As you might know, every client has its own subdomain (eg. company.peers.me). Every user at this domain can share waves with other users and groups at this domain. Say you’re a user at mycompany.peers.me and want to share a conversation with the development group at company.peers.me. At the moment you should have two accounts and switch between these accounts to communicate with users at both Peers.me domains. But with internal Peers.me federation, you can just add a user or group from another Peers.me domain to a wave without having an account at the other domain.

Here’s a short movie to explain it a bit.

Pretty cool! Isn’t it?

When will we have internal federation? The last couple of weeks we’ve been migrating existing clients to a centralized and scalable infrastructure.

We’re currently running MySQL, but to offer federation efficiently, we’re in the progress migrating to a scalable MongoDB database, running on its own dedicated cluster.

Things we’re exploring right now are the administrative controls we need to offer to a Peers.me domain admin when introducing federation. Think about controlling who users and groups can federate with, allowing federated groups, spam control etc.

We will keep you informed about the progress and are expecting to release internal federation this summer.

Other stuff for the coming weeks Next to migrating to MongoDB, we’re also rewriting the inbox and wave interface so we can offer real-time communication. We’re switching to a full javascript client, using Coffeescript and Backbone.js.

First improvement is reducing page reloads to a bare minimum, offering a more seamless experience, keeping you informed instantly about activity and updates.

“I have ideas/questions, where can I submit them?”

Mail us at support@peers.me or create a ticket at our Zendesk page.