ActivityPods Releases Example App to Help Developers
Using ActivityPods as a framework, not just a platform.
ActivityPods is a fascinating initiative to combine Solid and ActivityPub into a single framework. The project is steadily progressing towards version 2.0, and the people behind it are looking at how to make their efforts more accessible to the developer community.
Their latest effort includes a basic boilerplate app, with a guide to help people set everything up easily. While the app takes a simple, no-frills approach, the effort highlights some pointers on how to use the framework.
Following the footsteps of other ActivityPods applications, the boilerplate app is based on SemApps, a toolbox for semantic web apps that leverages react-admin for its frontend.
The Backend
Due to the nature of the project’s architecture, people building for ActivityPods need to run several backend applications at once. Recognizing this hurdle, the project developers included a simple Docker script to build and launch all of the necessary parts. These include:
- MyPod – a frontend and backend for managing your pod data.
- Apache Jena Fuseki – a SPARQL server for inspecting and working with the TripleStore data in your pod.
- Redis – a distributed in-memory key-value database.
The local development version of MyPod. 
Filling out my profile for initial sign-up. 
MyPod’s management interface 
The overview of Fuseki 
Fuseki provides a query interface with SprarQL, which can be used to search semantic web data. 
Rows of semantic data returned by default. 
A basic dataset management interface in Fuseki. 
My account profile in MyPod. 
When you sign in to applications for the first time, a shortcut appears in the Applications section of your pod. 
Managing my personal data in my pod. 
An example of an activity that is stored in my pod.
On paper, this might seem like a lot to keep track of. Thankfully, the included script allows developers to run everything with just a simple command: make start.
Launching the App
Once the core infrastructure is up and running, it’s time to launch the app. For development purposes, you’ll need to use Yarn commands to run the frontend and backend of the example app. After that, any changes you make to the code will be reflected in real-time.
The example app itself is fairly bare-bones, and only lets you create Event activities. However, for a capable developer already familiar with React, this example is a great way to present how ActivityPods works, while leaning on technologies they already know. Paired with the project’s comprehensive documentation, this might be a great way to entice early developers, and give them the tools that they need.
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