Hey friends,
In the previous update, I wrote how we started building a toy app in the new protocol PPPPP. Well, I bring some great news about it. It works!!!!!
It wasn't without obstacles, but I managed to get two computers connected to the same hub server and sending each other messages, replicating each others' database. Garbage collection also works, which means that old content gets automatically deleted. The toy app is a collaborative whiteboard, so you could see drawings updating on both computers. Here's a photograph of the special moment:
Putting code in production is always such a good way of knowing what components are actually important in the codebase. It brings a lot of clarity. Although I thought the codebase was pretty solid, building the toy app helped me immediately identify critical bugs (such as this database bug) and missing components.
For managing network connections, I built ppppp-net, as a port of ssb-conn. Then, invite codes turned out to have a lot more details than I expected ([1], [2], [3], [4]). And we even made secret-stack better – the framework that SSB also uses.
The excitement reached new levels when Mix, Mikey and I got on a video call and we tried this collaborative whiteboard app syncing between all of us, and although it occassionally worked to synchronize data between Europe and New Zealand (!), we found even more bugs to fix. So next month we'll just continue fixing those issues and testing the app between us until we're confident with it. And from there, we just need to document and package all the libraries and examples for the launch.
As per tradition, here's the updated roadmap-to-launch:
Thank you for your support!
– @andrestaltz