Monthly Development Update — August 2020
After successfully releasing Swarm Alpha at the end of June, we’ve been working on new features integration for the Swarm Beta release.
August was a very productive month with the Bee Summer release bringing a ton of new features for dApp developers. Additionally, we have also published the first recipients of Swarm grants. We were humbled by the response and number of applications we got, see more details below.
The Swarm Beta release is scheduled for 28th September 2020 and as usual, we will mark the launch date with an online release event. Please RSVP here.
Bee Summer Release v0.2.0 — release notes
The new release improves the utility of the DISC (as released in v0.1.0) and lays the foundation for Swarm bandwidth incentives. To that end, we:
- provide features for developers to start building unstoppable applications on top of Swarm: manifests to represent a collections (websites, indexes, directories), single owner chunks that serve the basis of swarm feeds. Range query support, name resolution through ENS and RNS, encryption
- ensure persistence with global pinning: volunteering nodes make their locally pinned content accessible to a fallback recovery protocol that downloaders trigger in case the network removes it due to rare use
- improve the UX: improve tags to help follow the status of uploads, Printconfig: a new command to the bee node, allows you to print the current configuration (including all default values to the console)d. Install script. This handy install script detects what system you run and makes installing bee a breeze
- lay the foundation for Swarms bandwidth incentives, ultimately ensuring a self-sustaining network with economically incentivized replication of popular content: accounting subsystem to keep track of data transfer on each peer connection, mock settlement protocol.
- brand new documentation, which you find referenced in the README.
Core
- Implemented settlement protocol and payment threshold
- Implemented global pinning using pss and push syncing
- Improved node connectivity in some edge cases
- Improved tags implementation
- Added support for HTTP range requests with joiner seek feature
- Cleaned up json http testing helpers
- Ensure Go 1.15 support for the Bee project
- Added printconfig cli command
- A significant work has been done towards the resolver implementation
- Implemented welcome message change at runtime
- Improved HTTP API with per endpoint request body limit
- Added accounting metrics and debug api
- Manifest implementations are finished for persistent website hosting
DevOps
- Upgraded Swarm Production cluster to Kubernetes 1.17
- Upgraded Bee Alpha cluster to Kubernetes 1.17
- Deployed Bee Staging cluster
- Released new version of Bee Helm chart (v0.5.4) with support for Global Pinning and improved PVC management
- Released new version of Beekeeper (v0.2.18) with manifest and chunk repair integration tests and improved local pinning
- Updated bee-staging and bee-local repos to support latest Bee/Beekeeper versions
- Added new accounting dashboard to Grafana
Ecosystem
- Swarm grants: the first round of applications have been reviewed. Read this blog to see the list of approved projects.
- intOS — https://github.com/jmozah/intOS-dfs
Events
We will kick off the day with two workshops in the morning, starting at 11:00 CET, where we will guide you through everything you need to know about how to run your own Swarm node, build unstoppable dApps and publish censorship-resistant websites on Swarm. This will be followed by an online event starting at 18:00 CET, packed with amazing talks, guests and demos.
Follow our Twitter or Reddit for more information.
RSVP for the Swarm Beta event and workshops here.
Join our community
- The Swarm team is reachable on Discord. All tech-support and other channels moved there. Please join us on Discord!
- Follow us on Twitter.
- Discussions about Swarm on /r/ethswarm and /r/ethereum subreddits.
- Please feel free to reach out via info@ethswarm.org
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