Open versus Closed source:
Eventually part of the new explorer will become open source. I am writing a tool system that can be used to create other applications that depend on block chain information. This system will gather data from the coin daemon, populate a database and provide a basic query system. It will be adaptable to any information one can get from the coin daemon and its configuration will almost be completely database driven. The configuration file will only need to point the system to the database it is to work with.
The ultimate goal will automatically sort the information keys it receives from the daemon based on column names and disregard keys that do not have columns. The system written so far does work that way, but code customization is still needed at this point for embedded objects in the JSON output of the daemon (Embedded lists for example. Python sees them as a list object inside a Dict. object.)
The final system will let anybody setup a customized block chain database by simply setting up tables and columns. A configuration table would tell it what commands to issue and in which tables to sort and store the results. I also believe this table will be where one defines the objects within objects stored in the key values it gets from the daemon.
One could build any alt-coin application from it, including of course a block explorer. I will be keeping the CCE block explorer application of this tool private. Though I will probably provide a basic block explorer example in the source.
And so on.....
CCE is not run by a team of developers. I am the sole developer of CCE. Although CCE and this new project are quite large projects I have taken on, I believe it will benefit the alt-coin community greatly.
This also means, aside from donations, I am the sole financial support for CCE. I appreciate all the donations received and I am not writing this to beg for more donations (though they would be extremely helpful). Donations fall way short of costs in both servers and my time.
I have tried to acquire funding through the opening of pools (cryptocoinmine.com), but the pools have ended up losing money rather then gaining it. I am going to shut down CryptoCoin mine completely except for the Goldcoin pool as the Goldcoin community has shown outstanding support for the pool. I may open a Primecoin pool at a later date after the parameters of how such a pool would work best is established.
This means I am going to move to advertising on the new explorers. In the past I have been very much against it, but I see no other choice at this time. I will keep them them as small and unobtrusive as possible and my plan is only one advertisement banner at the bottom of each page. I have made no decisions on who I am going to use for advertising, but it is coming in CCE III.
I will setup a website mock-up of the look of CCE III sometime in the near future. Until then, back to the world of getting coin daemons, python applications and databases to play nice with each other.