Can I port existing apps to Solid?

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Is it possible to port an existing app to Solid? For example Etherpad-light or WordPress?

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I don’t know the former, but you can’t ‘port’ WordPress. Well you can, but I don’t think that’s what you mean by port (which really means rewrite anything needed to achieve the same functionality).

That would be very difficult because you can’t run PHP (or any of your own server side code) on a Solid pod.

You can still create a blog app (see Solid Plume) and pretty much any other kind of app, but anything that uses a lot of server side code world be more of a rewrite.

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You can make any app Solid compatible to at least some degree, e.g. allow to login with WebID or store a copy of data in a user’s pod.

Regarding wordpress I wrote a plug-in that exposes wordpress posts as linked data so that you can link your blog and posts with your Solid Pod, see Connect WordPress Blog with Solid using wp-linked-data Plugin

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@happybeing are individual banking transactions, balances and bank a/c details storable on Solid pods pls?

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Any data can be stored, so yes, but I wouldn’t advise it without being sure it was private and secure so it’s not something I’d recommend at this point.

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There is this project: https://solidpay.org/

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thanks guys. i have checked out solid pay and wanted to chat with author. cant find contact info for this Melvin, as per github.

@happybeing, private and secure point. solid pods are meant to be an encrypted container with windows and doors ready for future connections. but when i went to create a pod of my own, the warning message says no security is guaranteed?

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@guangd2000 https://github.com/melvincarvalho

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At the moment data is not encrypted on a Solid server, so is accessible to anyone who has access to the server (such as a provider, server admin etc). So if you want to store sensitive data you will need to deal with those issues, as well as all the other security issues related to servers exposed to the internet.

There may be plans to improve this area, but none are public AFAIK.

My own approach to solving this and other issues with pods as a service is to put Solid on SAFE Network, which is fully encrypted and does not allow access to data to anyone without explicit permission (no server, all data at rest is encrypted, all data in transit is encrypted), and avoids the problems with servers by eliminating them in favour of a secure decentralised network.

The best way to contact Melvin is to mention him on the Solid gitter chat, but he may just be busy with other things atm.

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Thanks @happybeing and @aveltens!