psibase 0.18.0-pre highlights

The new `0.18.0-pre` version of psibase has been released.

There are too many updates to go through all of them in detail, but this article highlights some of the main themes in the 0.18.0-pre psibase update.

New/improved system apps

Related PRs: [PR #1180, PR #1236, PR #1270]

Backend fractal service

In the 0.17.0 update, it was mentioned that an evaluations service was delivered which serves as a backend library to facilitate rank-ordered polls among groups of people, such as those that the fractals application will eventually use for governance purposes. In this release, we delivered the first draft of the new fractals backend service that leverages evaluations to generate a rank-ordering of the members in the fractal. A very basic front-end was delivered, primarily to test the backend functionality. We plan to develop a more fully featured UI in the coming releases.

Updated graphiql interface

With just a small amount of code, psibase apps can serve a graphiql front-end for exploring and executing GraphQL queries to the backend service, for example:

For a while, that graphiql interface was broken, but it was fixed in this release, allowing much simpler GUI interaction with backend services:

Node robustness

Testnet-related

Related PRs: [PR #1260, PR #1265, PR #1264, PR #1259]

Several changes were made to improve node robustness, configurability, and logging, addressing issues that surfaced while running our multi-node testnet.

Importantly, we found and fixed a bug that affected message routing between peers in a minimal CFT network after node restarts. This bug caused our testnet to stop producing blocks at some point during June.

Parallel signature verification

Related PRs: [PR #1186]

A generic method was introduced that allows privileged services to schedule parallel execution of actions. This is currently used by the transact service to schedule the verification of transaction signatures, which increases the throughput potential of the network.

Conclusion

A major focus of this release was improving node stability, due to the issues encountered on the testnet last month. Besides that, we are continuing to prioritize the implementation of the apps that are necessary for the core network responsibilities (e.g. governance).

Hopefully, this helps contextualize the updates in psibase v0.18.0-pre.

Until next time,
James