Weekly Development Update — November 1st 2019
Hi Computable Community!
We’ve got a number of exciting updates this week. To catch-up on what we’ve been up to, check out last week’s update. This week, we’re going to expand our distribution of our weekly updates by cross-posting them on both our forums and on our medium.
Last Week’s Updates
Computable Terminal UI now at stable v1
The Compas UI is now at a stable v1! We held a small internal tutorial session where we on-boarded our team into using Compas for debugging and internal data market governance purposes. The session was very successful, with attendees able to use the terminal UI to rapidly interact with data markets. Previously we’d used a web-based wallet UI to directly interact with contracts, a method which was buggy and required many clicks to execute simple interactions. But with Compas, we have a light-weight, interactive view of the global market state. Check out this top level control panel:
It’s possible to expand this panel out to gain more information. Recall that a “listing” is a chunk of data in a data market. It’s possible to use Compas to “double click” on a particular listing to gain more information about its current state:
Debugging Data Purchase Through Front End
We laid the groundwork for purchasing data through the frontend last week and this week we iterated on trying to get data purchases up and running. We found a few bugs, where we had some subtle error conditions with transactions and file delivery. We’ve made progress towards smoothing these out and managed to get the delivery partially functional through the frontend. We still have a few encoding problems, but we’re hoping we get these cleared out son.
Second Pass through Web Frontend to Stabilize and Improve
We spent a good chunk of this week cleaning up our web frontend. With the exception of data delivery, all of our core flows are functional, but in MVP form. This week we hammered down a bunch of loose corners and took steps towards making the frontend more robust and usable. We’ll have more to report (hopefully with pictures), next week.
Groundwork to Deploy on Public Testnet and Mainnet
We did some early scoping this week to work out our process for deploying our contracts to public testnet and mainnet. We’ll start executing on these plans next week.
Improving Frontend Deployment Infrastructure
As we gear up to launch, we took some time to make our frontend infrastructure more stable. We set up continuous integration, and created an automatic deployment process that will push the latest development version of the frontend up and connect it with our private testnet.
We’re beginning to realize that having a deployment pipeline, where “dev” is the private testnet, “staging” is the public testnet, and “prod” is the mainnet is a paradigm that might work for our frontend infrastructure. We’re doing more work to understand how to execute on this insight.
Next Week’s Priorities
Shipping to Public Testnet
A big milestone on the way to mainnet is being able to deploy contracts onto a public testnet. We’re planning on deploying a public testnet version of our release candidate contracts and connecting them to our frontend next week.
Testing Deployment to Mainnet
As part of our gearing up towards a mainnet deployment, we’re planning on running some simple tests of our mainnet deployment process. We’ll probably ship a simple ERC20 contract onto mainnet to verify that our process for deployment is running smoothly.
Completing Delivery through Frontend
We’re getting very close to completing deliveries through the frontend. We’re going to push hard on this and get the web UI functional.
Getting Involved
We’re excited to grow the Computable community. If you’d like to get more involved, follow us on social media or chat with our devs on Discord. Here are some references to help you get started:
Originally published at https://forum.computable.io on November 1, 2019.
