Updates

Events

1 July 2021 — Solid World July — Academics were at the forefront of July’s Solid World. There were many exciting and collaborative pieces coming together this month — from hearing the winner of a Solid challenge to learning how students are innovating new versions of applications.

We missed Tim Berners-Lee, but we felt his well-wishes during the event. In addition, there’s some great news from Ruben Verborgh about the Community Solid Server. He told us how CSS 1.0 is on the right track for its release, and it’s currently in beta. Oz, the VP of Product at Inrupt, gave us an update that Inrupt’s Enterprise Solid Server will be releasing its next version later this year.

Our first presenter was Tonda Karola, a student at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He found Solid on his own and built an email-like application, Inbox. He walked us through the functionality of how his application works. Some of the unique features include Linked Data Notification as communication protocol and ActivityStreams as the format. It runs in a browser with no backend or database, which keeps the data between the user and their Solid pod. His next steps are pagination, more caching, and keeping saved messages.

Next was Dan Barclay, an intern at Inrupt, who gave us a demo of his messaging application called Cend. Cend is easy to use with features like creating different rooms, joining a room with its specific room id number, and making the room public or private. He broke down how the messaging service would work and what he used like solid-client-js, solid-UI-react, and Next JS. It is still in an experimental phase, but you can still try out the application.

Last but not least, Jose Labra, a professor from the University of Oviedo, and Marina Vidiago from Empathy (their partner for the challenge) presented their annual Solid challenge. This is their third year holding the challenge. Each challenge is about having students learn about Solid entirely on their own and creating a theme-specific application with features. This year’s theme was making a friend finder application. The students delivered 18 projects for the course, and three teams decided to participate in Solid Challenge, adding a promotional video. During the event, we announced the winning team was Radarin_en3b. One of the team members, Marcos Tobias Muñiz, spoke on behalf of the group, saying very kind remarks. Congratulations to the team!

We continuously learn how Solid is designed to support creators of all backgrounds to build. Exciting times are among us as new and different individuals begin using their skills on Solid. Join us next month to reflect on how this year is going and where we see it moving toward.

Community Spotlight

• David aka Smag0 aka scenaristeur – For his work on trying to figure out what he can do with Solid as an app developer, and learning openly.