Searchlight Traverse City Reboot
From Bar Napkin to Beachside Blueprint
Modern App Development isn’t just about features; it’s about safeguarding what drives your passion: your data. Being a prototype project sets the scope to be built in a home lab to run in the home lab. The goal is to shift away from focus on the clouds to set sights more local and adopt peer-to-peer as the primary architecture.
tl;dr
- Remove complexities and build all modern
- Remove dependencies but keep simplicities
- Simplify invoking service commands
- Simplify sending signals across sandboxes
- Create protocols that are front end independent
- Create an experience as proof of concept
Lines In The Sand
Working with Windows process elevation it is clear that there is an intended distinction between applications running in the desktop space as the logged in user and those running as a service as system. The system account by design doesn’t have direct access to the user’s hive of credentials, registry entries and files under %USERPROFILE%. There is a notion of impersonation but even the Windows documentation guides developers away from using this approach. The approach that does work is having a component of a solution run in the user space and communicate using one of those nifty distributed system model protocols to the service running with system permissions. The result is user generated notifications arrive at the service while the service can notify requests that need to be handled in the user space. While it is more fun for everyone to get along it is important to not expose potential threat matrix events by breaching walls of the sandbox.
Waves of Expertise
Protocols allow for the project to communicate between services but the data is only part of the guide. Built on the C++ language and the cross platform toolkit Qt is where the power of encapsulation is harnessed to balance automation with anticipation. This paves the way forward to abstract different components within the stack allowing experiences to be written in modern HTML 5 and CSS 3 standards. Of course a splash of fun needs inclusion. What's the point of prototyping in a home lab if you aren’t loving what you're building!
Navigation Check-in
Project codename Traverse City Reboot is the current home lab development. Updates in either the Append Only blog or vlogs on the studio channel will appear here.