Launching the Pod Spaces Alpha for developers
It is my absolute pleasure to announce that today we are launching an open Alpha for a product we are calling Inrupt Pod Spaces. Inrupt Pod Spaces is a hosted offering that provides access to the Enterprise Solid Server for development and testing. Similar to inrupt.net, it is meant to be used as a platform for developers to ensure their applications are Solid compliant and to test against the latest version of the server and specification.
No changes are being made to inrupt.net as part of this announcement and we will continue to offer hosted NSS as a service on that platform.
To sign up for Inrupt Pod Spaces please visit signup.pod.inrupt.com!
Notes On Compatibility
If you have an existing application that was built against the Node Solid Server it is likely that changes will need to be made to the application in order to work with the Enterprise Solid Server.
One major difference worth noting is that the Node Solid Server leveraged a protocol called Web Access Controls (WAC) for permission management whereas the Enterprise Solid Server will default to using a different protocol called Access Control Policies (ACPs).
If you want your existing app to leverage the power of ACPs, you will need to do some migration work. However, as this is a bit of a heavier lift, and some people want to start testing against ESS right away, we have decided to stand up a service as part of Inrupt Pod Spaces that runs ESS configured to use Web Access Controls for compatibility purposes. You may sign up for the compatibility mode offering at signup.pod-compat.inrupt.com.
Recommended Development Path
We recommend all new applications be written leveraging ACPs as that is the general recommendation for production-grade applications. If you have an existing application we recommend testing it against pod-compat.inrupt.com first, ensuring your app works with the ESS server using WAC. Then porting the application from WAC to ACPs and testing against pod.inrupt.com. Migration guides and FAQs will be made available at docs.inrupt.com
Thank you and look forward to hearing your thoughts on the new offering. The best place to leave feedback and request support is via Inrupt’s Operations Service Desk.
[*Note earlier versions of this post described the version of Solid - NSS server - as not being compliant with the Solid Specification. To add clarity, and not further confuse, NSS is at the time of this post conformant with the areas of the spec that have been finalized.]
