[ANN] Fafi, a Racket-based client

[Luke Emmet]

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