Tl;dr — new website, new Network, more ecosystem developers
Welcome to Streamr’s core dev team update for September 2019. If you have been following our project long enough, you might know we are reaching our second year anniversary!
Looking back at where we started and the progress we have made so far, it has definitely been a remarkable journey. In large part, the credit for this goes to you, our community. You’ve continued to trust and support us and that has allowed us to maintain our focus and consistently deliver the steps (and more) outlined in our roadmap.
As Gavin Wood mentioned during a fireside chat at Web3 Summit last month, delivering products is really hard. We are happy to announce that our next Network milestone, Corea, will be hitting mainnet very soon!
Corea milestone, the biggest Streamr Network upgrade to date, represents a pivotal point for Streamr project. Not only because it’s a big step forward toward a decentralized Network. But also because it has allowed our team to refine our internal process on design criteria selection (focus & trade-off), testing, monitoring and performance optimisation that will be all vital for our next Milestones down the road. A lot of effort also went into the validation process: stress testing, scalability testing, performance testing, and ensuring functional backwards-compatibility with the previous-generation Network, Monk.
All the planned Streamr Network milestones are intended to be drop-in replacements for the previous generation
This will help us minimise risks of incompatibility or disruptions with current platforms that are being built on top of our Network, whether they are internal projects (Core app, Marketplace) or external ones from our community members like Swash, myDiem and many other developers pushing data through our Network.
During the month of September, we also released a completely redesigned new public website. Huge credit must go to our design team and developers who worked flat out on this release, which incorporated rich assets, with concise and impactful messaging, coupled with a smooth user experience. I’d really recommend checking out the new ‘learn’ pages for the Network, Marketplace and Core. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect, with the launch of Corea Network coming soon and presentation of the Marketplace based Community Products at MozFest toward the end of October.
Shifting to the community development front, we have kicked-off the initial stage of Community Products integration with Swash team! We have been developing internal documentation to assist them in this effort and refining the Community Product creation flow as we receive new feedback. Very soon, myDiem will also start this initial pilot integration. Of course, the good news doesn’t end here. In the last month, we have been in touch with few more developers and projects that are planning to integrate with our technology stacks! Our ecosystem keeps growing 🙂
If you’re a dev interested in the Streamr stack or have some integration ideas, you can join our community-run dev forum here [Update: The dev forum no longer exists. Join us in #dev channel in Discord instead].
As always, thanks for reading. Here’s our regular list of updates:
Network
- Setting up mainnet for for the official launch of Corea
- Putting the new network components in dev environment (broker & tracker)
- Debugging JavaScript protocol problems
- Fixed authentication for public streams
- Fixed insecure random number generator that was being used in Engine and Editor
- Adding TLS connections between nodes to allow for encrypted data transfer
- Found a way to reduce CPU usage by switching websocket library, which could lead to 4–5x improvement in throughput
- Add Community Products support to JavaScript SDK library
- Improving Java library reconnection functionality
- Working on putting Corea network in streamr-docker-dev
Community Products
- Helped Swash team to get started with Community Products integration: deployed smart contract, set up Marketplace product
- End-to-end tests debugging, watcher debugging, staging was updated
- Kicking off Community Products integration with myDiem mobile app (Gang and team)
- Working with Community Products stats, mainly with members graph. Hardest is to get correct test data. Will just use mock data for testing it for now
- Working on products publishing flow
- Working on community stats view for easy access to metrics
- Testing the Community Products server deployment in our various environments
- Finished work on product deploy refactoring. Added deploy spinner animation
- Updated Community Products to use the new Monoplasma constructor with adminFeeFraction
Core app (Engine, Editor, Public Website)
- New public website officially launched, in conjunction to new domain migration from Streamr.com -> Streamr.network
- Completing zooming & panning improvements for Editor
- Fixed a couple of bugs with code editor, input connections vanishing on update
- Ethereum watcher was fixed but a problem still exists to be fixed
- Restructured developer docs sections according to Matt’s designs, halfway through that. Completing navigation and migrate new screenshot images
- Debugging and fixing WS reconnection issue that was killing GetEvents in production and did some minor Ethereum module fixes
- First series of video explainers completed to improve new users on-boarding and improve conversion
