Webapps on Embedded BSD

Corey Vixie, 2014

And the future of FreeNAS

Where are we now?• BSD is a popular choice for embedded

applications

• Clients are very fast

• What the heck is a “webapp”?

• Design and delivery matter, especially in an enterprise space

Why embed BSD?

• The GPL is getting worse

• BSD can be made super small

• Hardened, secure system

• Free software that’s actually free

“Fast clients”? What?

• My phone is twice as fast as my last-gen laptop

• Webkit, Gecko, and Trident are insanely fast now

• JavaScript doesn’t suck anymore*

• *It does, but not in the ways you remember

You get an app, and you get an app…

• Static websites aren’t dead

• Static websites are useless for dynamic content

• “One size fits all” is harder, easier, and more necessary than we think

“‘Design’ is a word that's come to mean so much that it's also a word that has come to mean nothing.”

—Jonathan Ive

FreeNAS 9

Out with the old• Based on Django, Dojo, PHP, other old web

MVC frameworks

• Hard to modify, toolkit-based

• People try to make FreeNAS plugins and give up

• Build hell - 20 minutes to see your changes

FreeNAS 10

What do we want?• Fast UI builds with easy, automatic deployment

• A single page app that works on all devices

• Server-side rendered templates

• A single, bundled .js file with client-side routing

• Pub-Sub websocket connections instead of long-polling

• Develop on any operating system

• Deploy on an embedded BSD target

What does a modern web stack look like?

Code from Facebook? In my open source software?

It’s more likely than you think.

It’s more likely than you think

How does it work?1. A source file is modified

2. The corresponding build tasks are run

3. The built app is rsynced to the BSD system

4. The webserver daemon restarts

Demo time!

That looked too easy! It must be staged!

• There’s currently some setup you have to do to the target:

• Volume and a dataset using Unix permissions

• rsync enabled

• ssh enabled

• Has a public key installed for the FreeNAS root user

Watching and using

• This is all live on the FreeNAS github, right now - development in the open, baby!

• We’re going to release a Yeoman generator that will help you create a ‘blank’ project

• Roll your own on any BSD-based target

Feel free to get in touchCorey Vixie

corey@ixsystems.com

@TooManyDatsuns