Hi everyone, first of all thanks for the help recently with the vault/network tests. It has been really helpful. For instance knowing that NAT Traversal is as good as it currently is was a fantastic bonus and saves us a ton of work. For instance almost 60% of all dev resources went into the low level network libraries with multiple versions of connection oriented UDP and now we can move forward with TCP alone. It seems a small issue, but in terms of resources for such a small team, it is a huge deal!
However, in saying that we did find that the blocking versions of sockets in Rust were too aggressive in emulating the operating system calls. We are resolving that by again putting almost all resources into refactoring the network library to use OS native calls via a library called mio. This is great news indeed as we can then hopefully put that to bed soon and get those resources where we want them, in vaults implementing messaging/safecoin etc. For details of any of these features please see the RFC’s related to them, they should be well publicised and debated by now and how we communicate deeper features in more detail.
We broke client projects - let’s fix that now
In the pretty aggressive recent networking tests though we left app developers a little behind. There was no secure way they could use the API’s and get more involved in the RFC / API process for applications (surely one of the most important aspects of SAFE). To improve matters, there we are splitting continuing tests into Vault tests and Client tests. We will continue at least one more vault test soon, but in the meantime we will run a stable network on the Digital Ocean droplets, starting from today. This client test network will not be to test anything to do with vaults and be reserved for app developers to work against something stable.
Please download the launcher here and the demo app here
Updates for launcher include :
Updated logs to provide more useful information.
Fixes for self encryption crashing apps on network full (you probably will not see this, it is a low balance error. The client still does not report this effectively, but it will happen during the RFC process below)
Also, the Launcher is looking at some significant improvements as per this [RFC] (rfcs/0036-launcher-api-v0.5.md at master · maidsafe/rfcs · GitHub)
The other community members are more than welcome to keep participating in the vault tests, as this is a huge help (we cannot emulate humans or real world internet connectivity). At the moment we really really do not want anyone to build vaults to run against the client test network (otherwise we need to use resources to block that via changes in code).
I won’t do a dev update here, but things are moving in crust, although we have 4 of the 5 devs there on some kinds of holiday/days off next week. Although Qi is not on holiday, he is attending and presenting at a conference in Beijing (thanks @qi.ma ). There is more happening in China that we will announce very soon.
Along with all of this, we will be doing some more PR activities very soon which will enable the project to move much quicker. Again, over the next few short weeks, we will hope to have lots of information in many aspects of the project moving forward. So technical, PR, structure, resources etc. will all get a bit of a push soon.
Thanks again folks all of this testing is truly helpful and we are reacting to each and every test with a rabid ferocity to make adjustments and test again. Github issues and RFC’s are being looked at a lot, so please keep this up, no matter how small, every little thing helps to make this not only a success, but more importantly get it into people’s hands more quickly.
No not at all, they are of supreme importance to the project really so we left then at the side of the road for a few weeks there. They should now start creating majic again and thee may be a few things coming that they will like a lot.