During the last four months we have made great progress on our mission to unify Tangle.Glumb, Tanglemonitor & Tanglebeat into a single public service site. With this post we want to update you on the work we have done so far and which steps will follow until the final project milestone in December.
If you like, you can read up on the initial EDF announcement of our project.
Service name
First of all, we have decided to name the unifying successor tangleview. We believe this name provides a better association to the purpose of the project than ”UNIO”.
Back-end
The primary work so far has been done on the back-end side. The major challenge was to (1) conceptualize the actual data / communication flow between the apps, (2) implement / adapt the concepts into our present apps and (3) provide an easy deployment system (via docker).
To get a better understanding, the following scheme illustrates the interconnection between all the modules:
The Tanglebeat instance collects and streamlines an arbitrary amount of ZMQ channels (nodes) and feeds all relevant Tangle data / metrics to Prometheus and the API instance (via NanoMsg channel). Of course, Tanglebeat -what it is known for- also sends custom transactions to collect actual confirmation times of the network.
The API instance provides WebSocket channels and API endpoints for front-end applications. All storage relevant data, primarily the Tangle transaction history, gets stored into a MongoDB instance. This DB type suits all our current needs and will also cover all requirements for the future, especially in regards to scalability and redundancy.
Front-end
Currently we are working on the front-end application or in other words: The public website / service which will host tangleview. As of now, we already have dedicated sections of each tool (Tangle.Glumb: Topology graph, Tanglemonitor: Confirmation process visualizer, Tanglebeat: Metrics & Charts). Further, there is a new dashboard, which displays all the relevant visualizations & charts onto a single page:
An important fact to mention: All the elements shown on tangleview are based on the same source of (tangle)data, which means better comparability. Although the front-end already works as intended, we still need to iron out some minor visual bugs and prettify the chart design. However, once this is done we will publish the beta site soon™.
Client Library
As part of the front-end development, we published a client library tangleview.js (JavaScript) which allows to easily access and process tangle data from our back-end or user hosted instances. Additional features will be added to the library as we progress within the next months.
To Do / Next steps
In conclusion, we have already solved all the hard parts of combining Tangle.Glumb, Tanglemonitor & Tanglebeat into a single service. Within the next months until December we will polish the front-end and publish the beta version of tangleview. Additionally, we will add and document all repositories onto our Github project site. There is also a very unique and fancy feature in the making, which will allow to browse the Tangle on a timeline. So stay tuned until the next update!
The UNIO team
