I'm working on a personal hobby project of mine, written in MOO [0] of all things. Its a bridge to homeassistant - it connects to your local instance and lets you observe and control anything you have set up in homeassistant from within the MOO - toggle lights, set thermostats, send tts alerts, etc. It also receives state change events, so you can have objects that act like their real counterparts and display up-to-date information as long as the bridge is online.
I run a local house MOO for my roomates and myself, and I thought it would be fun to control my smart home from it.
Challenges... The first was reading the web socket rfc and writing my own implementation, in what is probably considered an esoteric language at this point.
Next was discovering just how much of home assistant's web socket API is undocumented (read: pretty much all of it). There's a page which mentions a handful of APIs, and this got me started, but I really had to start reading homeassistant's code to see what other commands were available and being used presumably by the front-end to do some of what I wanted (listing users, subscribing to state updates for specific entities, listing areas, devices, etc)
From what I've read, apple and google appear to be working on rolling out APIs for contact tracing on their platforms, and apps you explicitly install are supposedly just the first stage, with later in-platform functionality presumably to come with regular OS updates. So It might not always be a deliberate choice made by users in the future, for good or ill.
I really like the idea, but the time frame of when the protocol will be "complete" seems (as noted by other commenters here and by the fact that it looks to have been posted in 2013) a bit sketchy.
Still, I'm seriously thinking about making server / client libraries for myself and others so this is less of "Here's this really cool idea and a few sort-of complete implementations", and more "Here's this really cool idea, and here's how you can integrate it into your sites if you want".
I use a cheap $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet with nginx, Nikola [0], and letsencrypt for ssl. Works great and I can expand easily if I want to add php or other wsgi apps.
I did this for a while and ended up expanding out to setting up my own email server, calendar server, and contact server. Needless to say, I'm a happy customer. :-)
Similarly, I set up two OVH Public Cloud 2GB instances $3.49 (4.49 CAD) with CloudFlare in front. Having two lets me set up master-master MySQL for Ghost and other play projects.
Your paying in CAD so assuming your in canada how do you find OVH, is there any north American severs? If not how is connection time to the website and general experiences with it? Cheers.
I haven't been using their 'Public Cloud' VMs very long so don't really have a strong opinion, so far it's seemed about as quick or sometimes quicker than DO. Too soon to speak for reliability. In the past, I've used their bare metal hosting which is very inexpensive (ranging from $90/mo - $1000 for 32G - 512GB), but you have to know what you're getting. Check the h/w they give you and if you find any issues with it, they'll replace it, but only if you notice and request it. The servers I've used were in Montreal. Thought I'd heard that they were planning on a datacentre in US East.
Definitely not as awesome as some of the others I've seen posted here :), but I made https://github.com/oliver2213/showerthoughtMOTD to spice up my message of the day on servers I log into. Usually makes me laugh and occasionally makes me contemplate things I normally wouldn't think about.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOO