MaidSafe Dev Update :safe: 23rd November 2015

The Troon office feels fully operational again this week as people return from being ill, holidays and visit from the other side of the planet. Decent progress is being made on the Routing bugs as outlined in last week’s Dev Update and progress can still be tracked via commits in the cleanup branch of Routing. As soon as we have eliminated the bugs and have a functioning Routing example again, I am sure the core guys that have been living and breathing the Routing cleanup, will want to shout this from the nearest mountain top, or alternatively and a lot easier just update everyone here on the forum. While this Routing debugging work continues not everything has ground to a complete halt in the other libraries or elsewhere in MaidSafe.

Network Core

So in Crust work continues on a couple of fronts, one of these is the Crust speedup RFC. When the Crust maintainers are happy with this RFC PR, it shall be moved into ‘Proposed’ and implementation JIRA tasks raised, once these are complete this RFC will be ‘Active’. The work on this RFC shall happen in a new Git branch, so as not to hinder the Routing progress, nor the RUST-5 deliverables in any way. In parallel to this, work is on-going with RUST-UTP and the Devs are collaborating with the owners of that crate to get a UTP connect function rock solid (and always passing tests) from a Crust perspective. The guys have done a great job tracing an issue we originally believed existed in Crust and hunted down the problem to RUST-UTP and are now cooperating with the authors to resolve this.

Client API

Heading up the stack; progress continues preparing for the resolution of the Routing implementation issues. Last week the client guys worked on the Firefox addon feasibility, to eradicate the FFI binding that was previously used and to switch to the Firefox XPCOM components to connect with the launcher. Also work to expose an API to the DOM layer so that the API could allow dynamic applications to be built begun, however these are just the initial steps of proof of concept (POC) to showcase the feasibility.

To make the above POC integrated with the actual addon, we are working on an RFC to allow authenticated access from the addon. Also a few DNS APIs must be exposed from the launcher side to enable the serving of content from the addon, thus an RFC is being worked on to outline what is required.

There was a request on another forum thread to expose the API from launcher to allow managing StructuredData and Immutable data. A RFC is pending in regards to this request. Another RFC in the pipeline from the client guys is a slight design change, currently public functions exposed from the safe_nfs crate are blocking calls. The Devs believe it would be better to change them to a non-blocking implementation. So a bunch of RFCs and PRs flowing from the guys, in order to make life easier for SAFE App developers.

MaidSafe Website

The website has seen a significant overhaul with the design and implementation guys working hard to provide a rich, fresh and informative end user orientated site. All of the design tasks are now complete; with the final tweaks being implemented and internally reviewed this week. This is the first of two new planned websites, the other being aimed at developers.

As the end user portion of the site stands, there are now four main pages. These main pages are: Features, Safecoin, Company and FAQs.

Features outlines some of the key features of the SAFE network to new and novice users. It gets them up to speed on some of the main problems with existing internet infrastructure and provides an introduction to some of our solutions.

The Safecoin page shares a lot of the goals with features and since safecoin is such an important part of the SAFE network, it needed it’s own page. The goal here is not to give advanced users in-depth knowledge of the implementation, but to simply be enough to pique an interest in new novice users and direct them where to find out more.

Company page does pretty much what you would expect and provides an outline of our goals and motivations as a company, as well as including a careers section and the dreaded staff images, you have been warned :slight_smile:

Documentation

FAQs has been changed from what was originally conceived as a hub for support. It has now been scaled back to an FAQ page and as a place to channel interested users to the community forum and media wiki sites to gain more information. One of the reasons for scaling this back is that kicking off later this week will be a project to seriously tackle Documentation or our lack thereof. We understand that useful, up-to-date documentation is lacking and has been an area we have neglected for way too long. So a new team is being created to tackle this, areas they plan to cover include: Libraries (core and app help); Apps (illustrations, tutorials, etc); API (scope of the launcher and what it provides for Apps); Blogs (for example a series presenting each core library by the maintainers themselves is one idea); Samples and finally Tutorials. So hopefully more news to follow on this after the team meets for the first time this week.

So still moving steadily in the right direction, no TADA! :tada: just yet, just stay on the lookout for sleep deprived developers rushing toward the summit of a Scottish mountain.

46 Likes

This is really great, Ross. Thanks so much.

6 Likes

Excellent summary Ross. In the US we will this week celebrate Thanksgiving. In that spirit I would like to personally
thank the entire development team for all their hard work and perseverance through this unique creative process of
inventing the world’s first truly decentralized Internet. While we are all anxiously awaiting a proper launch we realize that
it must be done right and this team is the one that will get it right.

9 Likes

Very useful and encouraging update @Ross thanks. I hope you don’t mind that I added some headings - it’s a long and useful post to come back to.

8 Likes

Keep up the good work team MaidSafe! Definitely looking forward to the expansion of documentation!

5 Likes

Is maidsafe website maidsafe.net?

1 Like

Yes it is, but the new site is not live just yet.

3 Likes

Of course not, thanks.

3 Likes

I understand we can follow the cleanup brannch of Routing at https://github.com/maidsafe/routing/commits/cleanup but is there any sort of guesstimate on when this will be done? I do understand this is how software development works but thought I’d still throw the question out there.

1 Like

Reasonable question :slight_smile: Today we were talking and I suggested we take the whole week and just get it right and not rush a should be OK now version. It was a bit more confused than first assumed, but getting much better now. There are 5 of us on a hangout all day sharing a screen to work through it closely and well scrutinised. It’s such an important library that it has to be extremely easy to maintain and this week hopefully will see that, at the very most it will take a further week, but if it does the rest of the libraries will be moved on as well. I think this week we will have it all working again to allow that to happen.

It’s a shame the other libs got stalled here, but back on track by the weekend I hope.

15 Likes

I really think there needs to be a Community part to that!

SafeNetwork.org did that extremely well, with beautiful layout and points directly to all of our great community sites, like this Discourse forum, the subreddit, the Slack channel, and also to the informative pages of the network.

I think that’s really important for further growing and decentralizing our community, so please consider adding a place for new community members to learn about where to go to join in the conversations!

6 Likes

do you guys plan to release a 32 bit windows version of the client? if you do, how big the delay will be between 32-bit win version and the rest of the clients (which i presume will be out first). thank you!

There are a number of links throughout the site to the forum, meet up pages and media wiki. I agree it’s very important that new and prospective users engage with the technology and the community as a whole. Just like the mafia, once you join you can never leave!!!

8 Likes

Thanks for great update and for all the hard work the team is putting in! Look forward to the day I’m in Troon to give you all a big hug and high fives :slight_smile: The enhanced documentation rollout is exciting, really needed to speed up the awesome apps that are on their way! My technical lead @jezlight is up to his eye balls trawling through lots of varying and somewhat light documentation so a whole team working on that will help as we move forward with our team :smile:

Thanks again to all the maidsafe team!

2 Likes

Will the documentation be written where it is visible to the community, while it is being written? Might give the peeps willing to translate a headstart and the opportunity to influence things that need clarification :slight_smile:

1 Like

Once you go Slack, you never go back.

Lol

(SAFE Slack, that is)

2 Likes

Let the bugs hit the floor!

4 Likes

It’s all hosted in GitHub so it will all be available once the PRs have been merged @hillbicks. We have tried to keep this more text light than the existing site so hopefully there wouldn’t be quite as much work.

1 Like

And do you already have plans where these will end up? On the main website? If so, are there plans to build a multi language site? Otherwise it doesn’t really make sense to translate anything :wink:

2 Likes

Yes it needs to be thought about in more detail, I’ll speak with @Scott and revert back.

3 Likes