The ColonyExplorer aims to bridge the gap between the real world and the Colony Network by providing both developers and non-developers a means to view and interact directly with the Colony Network.
The features list is split into the user-facing web application, and the backend services and processes.
- Full statistics on the network (total colony, domain, skill, and task counts)
- Time series data to display trends
- Manage page with full MetaMask integration to allow the user to create a token, colony, and task via forms (no code required!)
- Individual pages to view data on a specific colony, skill, domain, and task
- Full pages that list out all colonies, skills, domains, and tasks
- Search box that allows for fetching a colony's details by giving an Ethereum address
- Web API to query data on the Colony Network
- Periodically crawls Colony Network to gather and generate statistics regarding the network
- Caches data into MongoDB to allow web application for faster data rendering
The Colony Explorer consists of three major components:
metropolis(web application)colony-inspector(backend daemon to crawl network)general-store(MongoDB database to cache data and statistics)
Each component is designed to run separately to allow for isolation and extendability.
metropolis is the web application that all users will interact with directly. metropolis utilizes a React.js frontend and an Express.js backend.
The goal of metropolis is to provide a hub for both developers and non-developers to directly interact with the Colony Network. The user interface allows anybody to query data from the Colony Network without having to write any code. For developers, an web API is also exposed that provides a way to interact with the Colony Network without having to set up dependencies or connect to the Etheruem network.
metropolis fetches live data from the Etheruem network, and cached data from the general-store.
Additional details can be found at metropolis/README.md.
The colony-inspector is a backend daemon that periodically crawls the entire Colony Network to generate statistics and save metadata.
The colony-inspector currently uses Node.js and a scheduled thread to operate.
Additional details can be found at colony-inspector/README.md.
The general-store is the MongoDB cache that holds some metadata about the Colony Network. The colony-inspector saves statistics and metadata into the general-store, and metropolis pulls data from the general-store to render data to the user.
Additional details can be found at general-store/README.md.
As this was only a hackathon, there are still many improvements that can be made to the Colony Explorer.
Here is a list of major improvements that we wish we had time to implement:
- Better UI/UX design (we focused on building functionality as opposed to designing UI/UX)
- Making all components distributed and resilient (load balancer for the
metropolisweb app, running distributed batch jobs across multiple hosts in the backendcolony-inspectorcrawler) - Leveraging a real time-series database such as InfluxDB or Graphite to store timestamped data
- Providing a graph-based page that graphically displays the Colony Network (and the relationship between all the different components)
- Incorporating advanced colony operations such as funding
As this was our very first project that incorporated blockchain & Ethereum (one of us had actually just picked up programming in general recently), we wanted to share the major accomplishments and learnings from this hackathon:
- How the Ethereum network works
- Interacting with Colony contracts via ColonyNetworkClient
- Interacting directly with Ethereum contracts by leveraging web3.js
- Building a full web application with a react.js frontend and an express.js backend
- Sending (and confirming) transactions to the Ethereum network takes some time...
- Working a full-time software engineering job and coding for a hackathon at night drains the brain fluids
Copyright 2018 Kevin Lu
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.