Summary
Here are some of the main things to highlight since the last dev update:
- We released a new stable NuGet package of the SAFE C# API.
- We added a new small feature in the mobile browser enabling users to browse the files from a FilesContainer. This should be available in the next release.
- We worked on adapting the
dogcommand to show every step in the resolution chain.
Vaults Phase 2
In the last week, we’ve been continuing to chip away at data handling by Adult Vaults. We have made good progress there, identifying requirements in Routing and reaching out to @adam and @qi_ma who help satisfy our requirements instantly. While we continue working on this front, we are also thinking about other components of the next phase such as handling network splits etc. Stay tuned!
SAFE API
After the latest release of SAFE CLI v0.12.0 last week, we started working on some new features and enhancements proposed by the community on the CLI dog command. It currently shows information about how a URL is resolved to locate the target content, but when this resolution means more than one indirection, it doesn’t show every step in such a resolution chain. Thus we are now trying to make sure it does show the complete resolution chain so the user can fully understand what content is being targeted by a URL, and how.
Some other minor additions are being made to the APIs for parsing SAFE-URLs, such as parsing and being able to manipulate the query params and/or the fragment. These are not used by any of the features we currently expose on the CLI but it’s something that will be helpful for app developers when dealing with SAFE-URLs.
CRDT
The efforts in trying to have a first PoC implementation for a CRDT data type continued during this last week. The sunny day scenarios for a Sequence data type are already working in this PoC implementation, thus we started working on the addition of vector clocks to properly handle and support concurrent operations. An example scenario where this could be required would be if two different insert operations coming from two different clients need to be applied in all replicas (Elders/vaults in our case), but the order in which these two new items are added must be the same on each of the replicas, with no conflicts. We have a first draft implementation for covering some basic cases of concurrent operations, and we are now trying to cover all edge cases by writing some decent tests which should help us in taking the implementation forward.
We’ve also been progressing with an AT2 implementation of safecoin, which has involved a large refactor of SAFE Client Libs to split things up and make it easier to understand. With that under our belt, we have a conversion to the basic setup for AT2 (without any validation etc… basically a conversion of what we had ready for the next step). This is working well and puts us in good stead.
In parallel we’ve been working on setting up new tests and “chaos” whereby we can more assuredly verify that our AT2 implementation is working as expected once we have the consensus steps setup. This should involve simulating dropped messages, to ensure we still converge on consensus, or clients/nodes acting maliciously so we can very that such behaviours are rejected as expected.
Furthermore on the back of that we’ve also started some modernisation of the SCL Rust futures implementation to make various facets of this simpler. That in itself is quite a big task. But it’s one we’ve had pending for a while now so it’s good to get it underway.
SAFE Browser / SAFE Authenticator (mobile)
Browser Project Plan
Authenticator Project Plan
This week, we fixed multiple issues in the mobile browser reported by the community. The README file for the repo and FAQ forum page were also updated to fix some broken links and to add some extra content.
Previously when trying to connect to the MaidSafe hosted section, we were showing the same error messages for different issues. To improve the error dialogs and make them easier to troubleshoot, we broke the connection process into two steps. Downloading the connection file from S3, and connecting to the SAFE Network. Now both steps show their separate progress and error dialogs.
We added a new small feature in the mobile browser enabling users to browse the files from a FilesContainer. Using this, users can now browse any FilesContainer using its XOR-URL/NRS-URL and can browse the files from a list.
We’ll be continuing to add more fixes and features before releasing a new version of the apps in due course.
We also updated and added to the SAFE Authenticator FAQ forum page, alongside fixing a broken link in the README.
SAFE App C#
We released a new stable NuGet package this week. The updated package contains the fix for the decode auth response API. Also, we updated the XorUrlEncoder APIs to support subnames. Previously in the C# APIs, it wasn’t possible to generate a XOR-URL with subnames; with the recent changes now you can supply subnames to generate a new XOR-URL. We also updated the XorUrlEncoder APIs to use a C# list of string instead of using JSON strings when generating a XorUrlEncoder from a XOR-URL.
Routing and quic-p2p
Last week we merged the test improvements we talked about in the last dev update and it already helped us identify another subtle bug we had, which we promptly fixed. We then implemented two small changes: one to expose a method to retrieve the current section adults and another one to modify the way nodes age during network startup - both requirements from the Baby Fleming team.
There is also another refactoring task in progress. This one aims to bring more sanity into the chain module. This module started a very long time ago as a simple data structure holding the history of section member changes, but over time accumulated a lot of unrelated functionality. The refactoring will break it down into several self-contained modules each with clearly defined responsibilities, resulting in cleaner and simpler code. We expect to raise the PR with this work very soon.
BLS - Distributed Key Generation
Since last week we have added more test scenarios to the DKG crate. Refactoring work is continuing here to improve it further. We are also making use of BLS-DKG to write up a Routing Simulation tool that would help us to investigate and integrate this crate with the routing module. This would then be used alongside Parsec making the network’s consensus process much lighter. Initial setup would be to simulate a newly forming section of Elders, simulate a churn by adding Elders as the DKG session proceeds, and test to see how the section performs in achieving consensus. This also would help us to check the crate’s usability within a churning section as it would in a real world scenario.
Useful Links
Feel free to send us translations of this Dev Update and we’ll list them here:
As an open source project, we’re always looking for feedback, comments and community contributions - so don’t be shy, join in and let’s create the SAFE Network together 
Things seem to be chugging along without any significant interruption since people were already working from home anyways.
