Market Place

I was talking to a friend on TeamSpeak the today and I brought up the idea of making a computercraft market place. I thought I would have people submit programs, I would review them and possibly add them. It would use a lot of the http api and I would host the files on my friend and I's website(mostly his). I would have the main program stored there. There would be a client you would run to download the actually program for automatic updates and have the new programs. It would be a GUI with keys, not clicks. The programs would have a basic description, short how to use, version, computercraft version, type of computer, and author. Basically I need programs to host and lua coders to help me, I could make this on my own but it would be terrible. My friend who normally helps me code is somewhat obsessed with World of Warcraft at the moment, so he is no help. In debugging I can't figure anything out on my own(normally) so if you want me to host you program or help, email me at mailmanq@bloccrew.com


Planned Features

Spoiler

• Download of Programs
• Details of Program
• Auto-Update
• Not much client side
• Client Side Upload?

What Kind of People I Need

Spoiler

• People who know PHP, I know no PHP, but that would probably be the language of choice for the online stored files, also it could allow a client side uploader
• People good with the fs API for obvious reasons
• People generally good with Lua
• Creative people
• People good at making pretty GUIs and stuff

The marketplace is not a bad idea, however, there is a lot of challenge to it as well. The most challenging to have is updating the database of programs.
Here is the program's order of operations that I suggest:

• Auto updating chunk, this will use an http call to your program and check if it's different from the version that is hosted on the computer, if different then update the program and restart it.
• Displaying API, have functions such as cPrint ect.
• Graphical User Interface API, this will be what controls the entire system, make this GUI API use Tables to determine how to react to selections, also, have the ability to scroll up and down on the gui. (When reaching the end of the screen, move all the options up so the next one can be read)
• Database Updater, this will happen regardless of version of the database, use an http call to a database online to get a list of programs, authors ect.
• Downloader API, this should be able to download and install the programs based on Table variables indexed during the Database Updater.
• Main Chunk, this should utilize the Displaying API, GUI API, Downloader API, to be able to create an user environment to be able to get user input and get programs that the user wants.

Suggestion:

• A search utility built into the GUI API to be able to quickly get through the large list of programs.

This could be done with GitHub.

I am actually learning some PHP so I can do this. I will write a PHP script to input data to a MySQL database, which will contain the description, author and path to the file. It will be like the Ubuntu Software Center, where you can download or upload any package you wish. However it will have limits for the size, uploads per day per IP address.

You guys have some neato ideas