Guidance for development options (frameworks and libraries)

[jfietkau]

This came up during a FediForum unconference session that I started, and @jernst suggested I take the idea here. Even though my initial thought was that it would make sense for fedidevs.org (heads up @andypiper), it may also be relevant for activitypub.rocks.

For developers new to the ActivityPub ecosystem, it can be difficult to survey what options are available to support development - are there libraries in my language of choice, what frameworks exist that may do some of the heavy lifting for me, and what level of abstraction do they inhabit.

Rather than just serving a big list of project links, I thought it could be helpful to guide newcomers through the solution space through a question-and-answer process to hone in on what they need. I haven't thought very precisely about what exactly the questions should be, but something along the lines of "what programming language do you want to use (and how dead-set are you on it)", "do you want to learn AP internals or be productive on top of it very quickly", "what are your needs re: system resurces, ease of deployment, etc"... may be helpful for directing people towards the building blocks they need.

[jernst]

I'm allocating this to milestone "Future" because we have lots of things to do before that ... but sounds like a good idea to me.

[andypiper]

I love the concept here.

We'd want a database backend to support that sort of branching Q&A approach but it does feel more approachable than the very long Awesome and Delightful lists with libraries of varying levels of maturity.

I think there's a lot of other things to think about around rebuilding activitypub.rocks, though!