Getting started with Dataswift’s Developer Portal — Registration
This article is the first in a series of blogposts that will look at how we can get started with Dataswift’s Developer Portal. This series will cover:
- Registration
- Creating a new application
- Updating and submitting an application.
In this tutorial, we’ll learn about the registration process for the Dataswift Developer Portal. Specifically, why the Developer Portal creates an additional testing account and why testing accounts are important while we develop a new application.
Create an Account
First, go to the Developer Portal and fill out all the necessary details to create an account. We’ll need to provide details like first name, last name, a valid email address, a username, and a company name which is optional.
However, if we already have a HAT PDA, we can click on “Start Here” at the bottom of the Signup page and follow the instructions to connect it with the Developer Portal.
The HAT microserver is a new technology that confers intellectual property rights of personal data to individuals through their ownership of a database, wrapped with containerised microservices. It then enables the HAT PDA owner to have a personal data account (PDA) to freely share their data with applications and websites.¹
Agree with the terms of service
Behind the scenes, the Developer Portal creates a new HAT Personal Data Account. So we have to agree with Dataswift Ltd’s Terms of Service and Permissions to continue. This is the HAT Microserver Instructions (HMI) where HAT users give permission to a specific application to access their HAT PDA.
Data access, reading or writing data, in a HAT PDA must be permitted by the user. In case one application requires data access to a namespace, it has to explicitly request permission from the user. This mechanism of asking permission from the user is called HAT Microserver Instructions (HMI).²
Verify your email address
Before checking out the Developer Portal, we first need to verify our email address. The Developer Portal will send future updates about our applications to this email address.
Resend the verification email
If we have problems receiving the verification email, we have to log in to the Developer Portal and then click on the “Resend Email” button. Another verification email will be sent to our email address. If we continue having issues with account activation, we can contact Dataswift at contact@dataswift.io for help.
Testing roles and organization information
Once our account is activated, we can log in to the Developer Portal to start the onboarding process.
What is a testing HAT?
To better understand what a testing HAT is, I’ll explain the separation between production and test environment.
Production is where the users will be using your applications and the test environment is to allow developers to use it for testing, development, etc. Essentially, it’s a replica of production that may contain experimental features and maybe even corrupted data.
For this reason, the Developer Portal creates a testing account for us to test our applications. We can find the testing credentials in the Testing roles page.
Another separation is that the production HATs sit in the “.hubofallthings.net” cluster and testing HATs in the “.hubat.net” cluster. In the next blog post, I will explain more about how we can interact with the HAT depending on our testing or live environment.
Organization information
At the next step of onboarding, we will see that more company details are needed to complete the registration.
In the Account Settings, we can modify those details. We can also see our unique Partner ID which we will need to quote if we want to contact Dataswift for support.
And that’s it! Now we’ve learned everything we need to know about registration, if you have any questions please leave a comment below.
What’s next
In the next article, we’ll learn more about Dataswift’s Developer Portal, how to create our first application and how we can start testing by writing and reading some data into our testing HAT.
[1] What is the HAT PDA.
https://docs.dataswift.io/technology/why/what-is-hat
[2] HAT Microserver Instructions (HMI).
https://docs.dataswift.io/guides/hat-vending/hmi
