TEST: Evaluating Dat Project

[erictleung]

Dat Project (https://datproject.org/)

"Dat is a nonprofit-backed community & open protocol for building apps of the future"

Some motivation for developing Dat (emphasis is mine)

When sharing files, current tools have tradeoffs: lower costs and ease of use, or security and speed. Cloud services, such as Dropbox or GitHub, force users to store data on places outside of their control. Until now, it has been very difficult to avoid centralized servers without major sacrifices. Dat's unique distributed network allows users to store data where they want. By decentralizing storage, Dat also increases speeds by downloading from many sources at the same time.
...
In sum, we've taken the best parts of Git, BitTorrent, and Dropbox to design Dat.

There's desktop application made from Electron (?), but only exists for macOS and Linux (https://github.com/datproject/dat-desktop). The command line version is written in JavaScript just needs Node

npm install -g dat

Because it's written in JavaScript, it can be run through the browser to easily share and download data.

In browser tutorial https://try-dat.com

Dealing with Data

# Download data
dat clone dat://778f8d955175c92e4ced5e4f5563f69bfec0c86cc6f670352c457943666fe639 ~/Downloads/dat-demo

# Creating data to share
# Creates new empty dat to share.
mkdir MyData
cd MyData
dat create
> Title My Amazing Data
> Title My Awesome Dat
> Description This is a dat

Created empty Dat in /Users/me/MyData/.dat

# Sharing data
cd MyData
dat share

Caveat

"Your data will be available on the network as long as the process is open. However, if you need to close your laptop or turn off the computer, you might want to host the dat for long-term on a server." -
(https://docs.datproject.org/tutorial)

It appears we'll need to serve the data from somewhere.

More information on hosting the data on a server https://docs.datproject.org/server

Coverage of Project

• Featured in IBM's Bluemix Blog (https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2017/01/dat-project-big-data/).
• "Mathias Buus: Distributing Open Data with Dat" (22:26) (Published Nov 16, 2016) (Showing how Dat works with live demos)
• "dat: A Streaming Interface for Data", Max Ogden (21:24) (Published Dec 17, 2014)
• Max Ogden: Versioning, Syncing & Streaming Large Datasets Using DAT + Node - JSConf.Asia 2014 (43:13) (Published Dec 29, 2014)