Milestone 3: Gateway

[gsvarovsky]

We will develop an open source server application that provides secure, durable storage of data,
and a message delivery mechanism, for collaborative web apps using m-ld. We will provide a
hosted instance of this server as a service for testing by third parties without setup.

• 3.1. Gateway source code, providing (optional) durable data storage and (optional) message delivery
• 3.2. Deployed online Gateway service
• 3.3. Service security specification, including handling of personal data

[gsvarovsky]

Todo

• Anonymous users m-ld-gateway#11
• Deploy gateway to gw.m-ld.org m-ld-gateway#7
• Landing page on gw.m-ld.org (ready for Registration webpage m-ld-gateway#6)
• Docs published to doc.gw.m-ld.org on CDN hosted on gw.m-ld.org
• Security docs with personal data handling
• Self-hosting docs

[gsvarovsky]

outcome

• The gateway repository is https://github.com/m-ld/m-ld-gateway
• The online service and usage documentation is deployed at https://gw.m-ld.org/ – including instructions for self-hosting
• The architecture is a directory in the repository, with a security section

notable benefits

• The demo project at https://github.com/m-ld/m-ld-todomvc-vanillajs has been updated to use the gateway – and so, it has no build step any more 🎉
• The Gateway is designed to also be used as a 'sidecar' engine for server-side use-cases of m-ld, something we've talked about many times, e.g. for PHP environments
• We have refactored the m-ld compliance test suite to use a new package m-ld-test, which is shared with the Gateway for load simulation (see the gateway sim directory)

next steps

• Update the Getting Started section at https://js.m-ld.org/ to suggest use of the Gateway (as part of overhauling the m-ld documentation in general)
• Enhance the m-ld playground to work with Gateway domains
• Improve the documentation and functionality of the Gateway as required by users (including ourselves)
• Throttle and limit over-usage to save costs, if required! (would be a nice problem to have)
• Create a test/example project for 'sidecar' use of the Gateway – this would also fulfil the desire for a Docker platform m-ld-spec#41
• Run the m-ld compliance tests on the Gateway (now possible due to the m-ld-test library)
• Enable clustering of the Gateway – requires Socket.io mesh network m-ld-gateway#2
• As part of Milestone 2.4: Security Support #7 we will ensure that the Gateway supports apps using alternative authentication protocols, such as OPAQUE
• Perform a Security audit (provided by Radically Open Security)
• Outreach to find collaborators and users! 👀