Refactor/lerna monorepo #123

petermetz · 2020-03-23T18:13:11Z

This is work in progress - not requesting a final review yet, but feedback is welcome already

Started writing some code that enables us to scale up development by way of having

Standardized way of defining and (automatically) documenting the REST API through the OpenAPI specification: https://swagger.io/specification/
as much automation as possible in all levels of the development flow
universal packages where applicable (e.g. works both in browser and NodeJS)
Typescript usage for better developer experience both for maintainers/contributors and people who will import BIF as a dependency for their project.
Built-in support in the API server to host a web application for a user friendly way of testing/monitoring/managing a consortium of BIF validator nodes (which are now just called as API server in the code)
declarative REST API definition that backs the SDK code generation (no time to write client and backend code every time we add or change an endpoint definition)
plugin architecture skeleton in place: it can load any npm package in place of the default implementations
high flexibility of the API server through both CLI and ENV variables and static configuration files. Once you define a new configuration parameter in the code, the validation of it is automated at runtime and it also automatically gets added to the help text of the API server binary.

Still working on a lot of things, but I believe it to be off to a good start here.
The idea is to incrementally shovel everything from connection-chain and core to this code base performing the mother of all merges in the process, something that we've been working on for months.

Off the top of my head these are still missing/being worked on:

adding connectors and a lot of other things (but the plugin mechanism is there already to support it).
Open ID Connect - pluggable, testable, embeddable identity provider (in memory data store)
Secure Web Host Isolation: certain endpoints can be cherry picked to be listening on a different TCP port which supports enterprise use-cases with complex, legacy firewall configurations.
pulling in the connection chain endpoints that manage end chain registration
connection chain escrow mechanism, in a plugin-enabled way
further develop the plugin interface of the ledger connectors to include the compilation and deployment of their own smart contracts that they depend on (e.g. in the case of core the smart contracts that hold the foreign validator nodes' public keys.

How to test (if you feel adventurous or want to help out)

checkout this branch
cd to the project root
npm run configure --- takes on a few minutes, or 20(!) on windows (but at least it works on windows)
at the end of the output of the previous command, there should be a message printed with a new command that can start the API server.
you should see a couple of messages on the terminal saying that the API is listening on port 3000 and the cockpit UI is accessible on port 4000

ghost · 2020-03-23T18:13:18Z

There were the following issues with this Pull Request

Commit: 2a70e6b
- ✖ message may not be empty
- ✖ type may not be empty