LongTermVision

History.

Forest was created after the constatation that natural oral communications between individuals are peer to peer by nature. The author of this project though that communications using a computer should work in the same way, but in practice this is far from being the case. An alternative infrastructure had to be developed. Peer to peer networks already exist, however they usually lack inter-operability, and lack common practical technology support to leverage their development.

There is a lot of widely adopted standards, framework and platforms for centralized systems. For instance, HTTP, HTTPS, Apache server, J2EE, IRC, etc ... Peer to peer applications also have existing libraries, there are also a few standards which can be applied in some contexts, but there is almost no platform which can be used for general purpose distributed applications. Something like "Glassfish peer-to-peer server" has still to be invented. Forest was created to fill this technological and cultural gap.

Long Term Vision.

Forest's main goal is to enable Internet users to rely less on 3rd party Internet services when those services can be provided locally on their own computer. Doing so will result in more independence toward companies which are 'server-based', as well as an increased control of the user on his own data.

In the long term, Forest will provide:

• decentralized emails, forums, blogs, photo sharing, and a lot more.
• decentralized ways to interact with peers on existing web sites, similarly to existing centralized social networks.
• a massively established communication network for new and interesting distributed applications seeking for a fast user adoption.

Forest will also aim to ease the process of developing new decentralized applications for third party developers by providing a common friend-to-friend communication layer.

Adoption forecast and consequences for emerging distributed applications.

Forest is built as a common communication platform that distributed applications will connect to locally (i.e. inside the same computer). This means that once a user installs Forest on his computer and start to add contacts in its list, he will not have to do it again. As a result, it will be relatively easy for a user to setup any new Forest-enabled application freshly installed on his computer.

The more Forest is adopted by users, the more its adoption helps new distributed applications to be widely used.