Contents
It is an English transcription of a phrase in Hindi (the most popular language of India, spoken in the North of the country).
“Ha(n), ji?” is commonly used as a reply to someone’s call or request. It can be roughly translated in English to “Hello?” or “What can I do for you?”. For Hanji, it means replying to web browser requests.
Sure there are many great web services for sharing and exposing content on the Internet. Hanji takes a complete different approach, making many things more natural, specifically for user generated content, mobile applications, and some professional applications, for example.
All big services (Facebook, Orkut, Flickr, Twitter, etc) follow the same cloud model: your data is uploaded somewhere, processed somehow. Hanji takes all the informations from the source, making all your data staying with you (on your smartphone, your laptop, etc). No upload is required.
There are always many solutions to a problem: Hanji can be a better solution than other services for many uses.
Just 2 examples, among many other (probably we have not thought of all yet!):
The concept is too different from what people understand by “social network” to give a simple answer.
As long as social networking is a way to communicate with your friends, familly, colleagues, then the answer is yes.
If a social network is a place for searching people, then the answer is no: there is currently no directory of users (although it might come later).
You can always use Hanji locally: by pointing the web browser to the Hanji local site directly (for example: http://localhost:8899/).
For the rest of the world, it is accessible only if Hanji is up, eventually connected to the portal. This means that your device should be connected on the Internet to be accessible. We might provide an offline service in the future, if we find some kind of sponsorship for hosting data.
We know the network utilization is a serious limitation for any mobile application. That’s why we deploy a lot of techniques for optimizing the bandwidth: typically only few kilobytes are needed, and a GPRS connection is a bit slow but good enough. However if you want to share big files, music, a lot of pictures, or plan to get a lot of visitors, then you’d better subscribe to a fast and unlimited Internet access plan.
Applets provide a basic functions, like the geo localization, photo album, file sharing, etc. They usually have a panel in the web interface.
Some applets have a special role:
Developers can create new applets easily. See the Developer’s documentation pages.
Hanji can take care of that, thanks to the satellite applet, and the portal running on the publicly available hanjinet.org site.
For example, register on hanjinet.org with the name “john-doe”, connect with the satellite applet, and that’s it: your site will be publicly accessible through http://john-doe.hanjinet.org.
Yes, it is easy. For local, private networks, just activate the portal applet. Hanji works well with the mdns standard (known as bonjour or zeroconf), so web browsers like Safari will detect automatically Hanji sites around.
If you have an Internet server, you can create a public portal like hanjinet.org. The documentation is here: Setting up a public portal.
No, the portal is just a relay: it keeps the minimum information to maintain the connections secure and alive.
Yes. Hanji is customizable. Initially there are 3 layouts and 3 themes, more later.
Currently Hanji is not yet ready for the masses. However curious and experienced people are invited to try it now for free and give us feedback (the installation documentation is available here: Installation). Regular users will be able to install it seamlessly on a variety of devices a bit later.
Currently it requires some high-end phone: Nokia Symbian (E-Series, N-Series), Maemo, Meego, iPhone (maybe), Android, eventually Blackberry, any laptop or PC running Linux, Mac, or Linux (actually any device with Python).
Cloud computing is an umbrella term, don’t get drenched. It provides an abstraction where storage and processing is done somewhere, somehow. Customers/clients are happy because they don’t care anymore, everything is done in the cloud. Sounds simple. However it is finally a modern extension of the old mainframe/terminal model: not a perfect fit for all problems, right?
First, not everybody is/can/want to be connected on the same network (Internet), always. Second, uploading and downloading data on the cloud is sometimes suboptimal. Third, your data is somewhere, processed somehow. Nobody knows where and how... except the companies which host, process and serve your data. Who trusts completely “do not evil”, forever? Security, reliability, privacy, anyone? All common EULA (End User Legal Agreement) can be unilaterally changed anytime without notice.
We propose another model, decentralized. Think of it as an extension of the peer-to-peer model, a decentralized cloud. You can start your own cloud, connect it, expose what you wish, and accept who you trust in it.
Further reading: check the documentation here.