EnderWeb Phoenix - or, trying to fix up an old service (published 2019-06-19)

The EnderWeb was a service hosted by da404lewzer of TurtleScripts. It allowed for websites that could be viewed in the Minecraft mod ComputerCraft using a special browser called "Pearl". In this post, I'll explain the steps I'm taking to possibly breathe new life into this old service.

Step 1: Getting a Browser

As far as I can tell, nobody except for da404lewzer wrote a browser for the EnderWeb. His browser was the official "Pearl" browser advertised with the service (which makes sense, since he made the service). The code, while barely readable (although, when is Lua EVER readable?), is a nice reference implementation of the spec, showing how he implemented the parsing and display of the page.

The latest copy of Pearl I could get my hands on is included in my repo, simply because FINDING the damn thing was such a chore. It involved searching the Wayback Machine using a URL from the Reddit post to hope it was saved. Luckily, it was.

Step 2: Creating a Server

The only endpoint I can find mention of is the one used to get page content, http://api.enderweb.com/getPage/000000. This is the most important one, as without it, the page would never arrive to the browser. After some testing, I was able to get a test server working.

For now, I'm working on creating EnderEye, a replacement server, as well as modifying Pearl to be able to connect to non-enderweb.com servers. Other than that, I feel I've done enough to at least be a starting point for people interested in this sort of thing.