MaidSafe Dev Update 23rd November 2015
Follow the proces on GitHub/Maidsafe.
Don't get fooled by SafeCoin - The Real Safecoin. May Launch This has nothing to do with Maidsafe or Maidsafecoin.
The best place for information is the real Safenetwork Forum. It's run by volunteers from the community and paid for by Maidsafe. Here's the address:
SAFE Network Forum
Quote
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 Update1 and progress can still be tracked via commits in the cleanup branch of Routing3. 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 top5, 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.
So in Crust work continues on a couple of fronts, one of these is the Crust speedup RFC1. 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.
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 thread3 to expose the API from launcher to allow managing StructuredData and Immutable data. A RFC is pending1 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.
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 peek 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 :smile:
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.
So in Crust work continues on a couple of fronts, one of these is the Crust speedup RFC1. 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.
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 thread3 to expose the API from launcher to allow managing StructuredData and Immutable data. A RFC is pending1 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.
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 peek 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 :smile:
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.
For the rest it's just like the normal internet. Without a searchengine you'll need to know the address of the website or use a webring like the one above. 
