Building Decentralized Applications for the Social Web

Recent advancements in technologies and protocols mean that it is easier than ever to integrate social features into diverse web applications, and increased awareness of privacy concerns means that it is pertinent to consider empowerment of application users when doing so. Many developers are already familiar with the notion of personal data stores; this tutorial will demonstrate how to access or provide such stores for users, and build simple web applications which read and write to the storage whilst remaining completely decoupled from it. This advantages developers in two ways: by removing the burden of storing and maintaining a canonical copy of user data; and by enabling access to and ease of integration with data created through other applications, creating richer, seamless experiences. From the application users' perspective, they need no longer commit and become bound to particular services, but can mix, match and move between those that best meet their needs. We will introduce Solid, a set of protocols based on existing W3C recommendations, for reading, writing and access control of the contents of a personal data store, which can be layered up in order to integrate various social features into new or existing web applications. Attendees will leave with an understanding of Solid and how different parts of the protocols can work together, and having written some code to implement the parts that interest them most. They will also have hands on experience with existing libraries and tooling to facilitate working with the Solid protocols. Those who stay for the full day will have an opportunity to build a small but complete web application with decentralized social features, and to collaborate with others to see the advantages of sharing data between multiple applications.