IPFS is a new hypermedia distribution protocol, addressed by content and identities, aiming to make the web faster, safer, and more open. In these posts, we highlight some of the development that has happened in the past week. For anyone looking to get involved, follow the embedded hyperlinks, search the wealth of information on GitHub or join us on IRC (#ipfs on the Freenode network).
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Here are some of the highlights for the second week of March:
Orbit is back in active development and going through a major code base overhaul. It now uses orbit-db as it's database layer.
orbit-db is a KV-store and Event Log on top of IPFS which allows developers to use IPFS as a database. Last week orbit-db got big performance and stability improvements and is now using CRDTs for eventual consistency.
@diasdavid: I don't know what these mean. Why are these changes important? Can you explain them in English a bit more? Also, these weren't mentioned in the sprint hangout as things done last week - why not?
The js-multiaddr implementation was upgraded, now that it now matches go-ipfs features. This interoperability which means protocols whose code's required a varint
mafmt now does uTP and WebSockets validation as well
new libp2p-swarm released, check it out :)
A nasty bug in our networking code was fixed this week. An issue in yamux (our primary stream multiplexer) would cause code to hang when opening a new stream if there were too many in flight stream opens. As a result of this, large file transfers (ipfs refs -r, ipfs get, and so on) would hang.
IPFS 0.4.0 is now very close to shipping: we ran @dignifiedquire's randor tool quite extensively and are more confident in the repo operations that have changed since 0.3.11. The release now has a somewhat short checklist of things that are blocking the official release.
As a small side project, @whyrusleeping started benchmarking each of our possible datastore implementations with ds-bench. The results will help us improve the performance of our storage moving forward. On that same topic, @whyrusleeping started an experiment in new and exciting datastores and wrote a datastore implementation that can be backed by a sql database. He then spun up a postgresql database (from docker) and ran the benchmarks against it, without any sort of tuning the initial performance metrics showed that it was around three time as fast as our current on-disk datastore. (Note: the metrics are simply testing the performance of writing random 256k binary blobs to each datastore).
@jbenet met with ConsenSys and Ethereum people at the MIT Media Lab. TODO Fill out.
c-base/ipfs-ringpin is a set of tools for setting up an IPFS "file pinning ring" between multiple parties. Can be used for example for hackerspaces to provide redundancy by pinning each other's files.
the-gred/jsjob-ethereum is an experiment at creating a computational market on top of Ethereum. Computational jobs are run in a JavaScript sandbox, and both input data, the algorithm to run, and the produced results are shared over IPFS.
Across the entire IPFS GitHub organization, the following people have committed code, created issues, or made a comment on GitHub between March 7th (noon, GMT) and March 13th. We're autogenerating this list using this tool and this other tool, so please let us know if your name isn't here.
- Contributors
This newsletter is also a community effort. If you have cool things to share for the next weekly, drop a comment about it in the weekly sprint issue! The more people mention items they want to see in the weekly there, the easier it is to make this and send it out.
Thanks, and see you next week!
- Richard Littauer and Andrew Chin
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