Introduction to Flox, beginnings of request chapter.

[maypole.git] / doc / Flox.pod

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-=head1 FlOx: A Social Networking Site
+=head1 Flox: A Free Social Networking Site
+
+Friendster, Tribe, and now Google's Orkut - it seems like in early 2004,
+everyone wanted to be a social networking site. At the time, I was too
+busy to be a social networking site, as I was working on my own project
+at the time, a web application server called Maypole. However, I
+realised that if I could implement a social networking system using
+Maypole, then Maypole could probably do anything.
+
+I'd already decided there was room for a free, open-source networking
+site, and then Peter Sergeant came up with the hook - localizing it to
+universities and societies, and tying in meet-ups with restaurant
+bookings. I called it Flox, partially because it flocks people together
+and partially because it's localised for my home town of Oxford and its
+university.
+
+Flox is still in, uh, flux, but it does the essentials. In this chapter,
+we're going to see how it was put together, and how the techniques shown
+in the L<Request.pod> chapter can help to create a sophisticated web
+application. Of course, I didn't have this manual available at the time,
+so it took a bit longer than it should have done...