Today I found an interesting opensource project, named beakerbrowser. Beaker is a public peer-to-peer file sharing browser like torrents. Beaker works on dat:// protocol and just like other browsers it supports HTTP and HTTPS.
According to documentation, the beaker is a peer-to-peer protocol for sharing datasets and files. When you use Dat, your files are distributed across the network of peers who you’ve shared files with.
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About Beaker and its Features
Beaker supports p2p protocol called Dat, so that one can browse websites as dat://somename.com. These dat:// sites look like normal sites supported by HTML, CSS and javascript. Just like any other website you can interact with them like clicking links, downloading images and use developer tools.
The Core concept of the beaker is peers and seeding. Which means that viewers to a dat:// site connect directly to one another, downloading and sharing files. Participants on the network are called peers, when a peer contributes bandwidth to re-upload a site’s file its called seeding.
You can temporarily seed files or seed forever. Seeding options provided or 1 day, 1 week, 1 month and forever. Seeding only applies for dat:// sites. If a site supports both https:// and dat:// an indicator is shown as like P2P version available to change your preferences.
You can inspect all the files that make up a dat:// website. In beakers view source tool you can view others dat:// files and cannot able to edit them directly. You have to make an editable copy to edit them. This is similar to forking in GitHub.
dat:// in the beaker supports sharing or publishing a website from the browser within one click.
It is simple to create a new website with the beaker by clicking create new from the drop-down. From there you can start with an empty project or their basic template.
Beaker has a built-in editor for editing sources, which supports updating of HTML directly from view source. or else you can use your preferred own editors like Vim, atom, VS Code. this browser supports live reloading facility, it will automatically reload the page.
Beaker Team
This p2p service was developed by Paul Frazee in August 2016 after participating in the inaugural of Decentralized Web Summit. And at October 2016 Tara Vancil made her first contribution and joined full-time in April 2017. Mathias Buss is the core developer of dat:// protocol, officially joins Beaker team in 2018.
