Interledger setup about five-bells-ledger

[emschwartz]

Hi @kopnin,

Do you want to use Interledger with an existing ledger you have or do you want to run the full "five-bells" reference implementation stack? To see most of the reference components working together I'd recommend checking out the five-bells-demo.

Here's a brief rundown of the full stack:

• five-bells-wallet-client is a high level client for sending payments via the wallet
• five-bells-wallet is what you see at red.ilpdemo.org and blue.ilpdemo.org. It's a layer on top of the ledger and the core Interledger Protocol that adds UI and a number of additional features deliberately left out of core ILP.
• js-ilp is a low-level client for interacting directly with ILP.
• js-ilp-core is used by js-ilp and will be used by the connector. It includes key ILP functionality, like interfacing with the ledger plugins (e.g. ilp-plugin-bells) but you probably won't need to use it directly.
• five-bells-connector is an implementation of a connector one could run to enable interledger payments across two ledgers
• five-bells-ledger is a reference implementation of a basic ledger that supports all of the Interledger transport protocols. If you want to get Interledger set up on your own you could either run this ledger (and the client and sender would use the ilp-plugin-bells to connect to it) or you could run your own type of ledger and write a new ledger plugin (e.g. ilp-plugin-bells) for it.
• five-bells-demo spins up a network of ledgers and connectors on your machine and has a visualization running on top of them to illustrate the flow of ILP payments.

[alkopnin]

Thanks!

Yes, I want to run the full "five-bells" reference implementation stack. And I would like to connect to my Blockchain.

You mentioned about possibility to use the Blockchain protocols . In this case I don't need to use five-bells-ledger, isn't it? Does Blockchain is used as a Ledger Layer in this case?
Also, you wrote that connectors work with Ledger layer via js-ilp-core. Does it means that I need to implement ledger plugin for my Blockchain and configure five-bells-connector to work over my plugin?

Regarding five-bells-demo: Thanks for recommendation! I looked into the code and found that it use five_bells_sender to submit transaction. My assumption was that I should use five-bells-ledger (SLP) to transfer assets, what is the five_bells_sender?

[emschwartz]

Correct, you don't need the five-bells-ledger. To support your blockchain you'll need to implement a ledger plugin for it. We're in the process of refactoring the connector and sending/receiving client to work out of the box with new ledger plugins.

The five-bells-sender is the sending client we've been using to initiate payments. It still assumes it's talking to a five-bells-ledger. We're working on the js-ilp client, which uses the js-ilp-core, which will be able to use any ledger plugin that exposes that interface. This isn't quite done but it'll be done within the next couple of weeks.

Note that the wallet assumes it's talking to a five-bells-ledger and I'm not sure if we're going to adapt that to different kinds of ledgers, since it's primarily meant for demos.

[justmoon]

I'm not sure if we're going to adapt that to different kinds of ledgers

Probably not. A wallet is very tightly integrated with its underlying ledger and uses many more features than ledger plugins provide (create account, view history, etc.), so if we made a wallet for another ledger we'd likely fork five-bells-wallet rather than try to keep support for multiple ledgers in one codebase.

The easiest way to get an interledger enabled wallet for another ledger would be to add support into an existing wallet app. So for Bitcoin it could be added to Webcoin for instance.

[alkopnin]

Thanks, Evan and Stefan!

Wallet it's just a high level application. Sample wallet is good for demonstration reason. Normally, we have to design a new application (or integrate to existing app as said Stefan).

Regarding to five-bells-sender - do you recommend to use this abstraction layer to submit payments, or I should work directly with my ledger? Do you have plans to do sender as universal payment framework (to work via any ledger plugin)?

Let me summarize, please:
In my case I need

1. Implement ledger plugin
2. In nearest future, connectors will work with any ledger plugin implementation. But at this moment I can not to connect it to my own ledger plugin. (Looks like a blocker)
3. Implement high level application to operate with payments (similar with five-bells-wallet)
4. Adopt five-bells-sender to my ledger to submit payments.
5. Receive payments via ledger plugin

[emschwartz]

We're working on an ILP client that will use the same ledger plugin framework as the connector, which you would use to send and receive payments. You're right that the client and connectors working with different ledger plugin is a blocker -- this is the top of our priority list right now. In any case, it may be worth starting on the ledger plugin because the client and connector should be ready to use it within a week or two.

[alkopnin]

Cool! Thanks for answers.

Looking forward for any updates.