Welcome to Streamr’s core dev team update for August 2019. If you’ve been keeping on top of the Streamr project’s development, we officially launched the Core app a few weeks ago.
We showed-off Core to scores of Web3 developers over Berlin Blockchain Week. Devs were impressed with the easy drag-and-drop UX, revamped design and the nearly 170 built-in modules, which conveniently allow users to interact with Ethereum smart contracts without any frontend coding.
Our developers Tim Oxley and Jonathan Wolff hosted an online webinar walking through the basic aspects of Core: how to use most popular modules, connect real-time data streams, create event triggers, deploy smart contracts on Ethereum blockchain and how to trigger them automatically. If you missed it, feel free to watch the recording here.
In August, we also entered into a more advanced development stage for the highly anticipated Community Products. We have successfully deployed it in Streamr’s dev environment, which means it is ready for real testing and integration.
Our blockchain architect Juuso, who is leading the effort on this front, also reached out to Ebrahim in order to assist him with the first Community Product integration ever. If you haven’t followed previous announcements regarding the browser plugin that Ebrahim and his team are building, I highly recommend you check out this project proposal post. It is an understatement to say that the combination of ethically crowdsourced data, cross-border revenue sharing via Community Products and an open data Marketplace initiative will trigger a paradigm shift in the current state-of-internet. What an exciting few months ahead!
Of course, we keep pushing forward on the Streamr Network side too. During August we are continuing to work on the key exchange mechanism to deliver a true end-to-end encryption for the Streamr Network. Most code has been submitted and is under internal review. The dedicated Network developers also tried to make the Network testnet run stable under the current production data load. This meant creating a bridge to transfer data over in parallel. Streamr devs are also working on the logic needed to tackle duplicate data detection and message re-sending if there are gaps at the receiving end.
A final note. We don’t do boasting at Streamr. It’s a Finnish thing — you stay humble. But what rapidly became clear during EthBerlin was how amazed other teams were with how much we’d managed to ship and produce, and how far our ecosystem had already expanded, given that our basic team is only 30 or so members. It’s a lovely feeling to know you’re on the right path.
If you’re a dev interested in the Streamr stack or have some integration ideas, you can join our community-run dev forum here.
As always, thanks for reading. Here’s our regular list of updates:
Table of Contents
Network
- Testnet seems to be running stable under current production load. Nodes in Germany and Finland
- Encryption key exchange mechanisms are in PR. Big changes, it will take time to review the code base
- Preparing for a geographically distributed set of nodes to be added on AWS
- Starting to test existing components (Core, SDKs) against new network.
- Preparing AWS infrastructure for agile geographically distributed performance testing
Community Products
- Working on Community Products creation flow for product administrators
- Community Products server state persistence/playback on restarts is almost finalised
- Working on server deployment flow and detailed documentation for users
- Completed the setup for Community Products in dev server environment
- Juuso working on fixing tests (based on manual testing, the CP server itself is working).
- Deployment work continues on staging & production environment
- Marketplace frontend work to integrate Community Products has started
- Lots of devops work, fitting the pieces together in different environments (dev, staging, production)
- Devs are now in touch with Ebrahim on Telegram for the browser plugin
Core app (Engine, Editor)
- Finalized Core app for official launch
- Developer docs sprint completed and deployed to production
- Working on displaying module help content in docs and canvas editor
- Working on canvas embeds and sharing, the last major missing feature
- Improving example canvases and streams for the initial onboarding tours
- Working on ability to view public canvases without forcing user login
- Many other small fixes and improvements on an ongoing basis
Labs
- Setting up a Cisco router to run a network node
- Researching machine learning on canvases.
