Tendermint about ponzu

[nilslice]

Hey @faddat - I am familiar with your work with Dawn Project, very cool stuff. I have not yet seen the Tendermint project so I will take a look and get back to you about the rest of your questions.

[nilslice]

@faddat - I've attempted to learn a bit about tendermint and the cosmos network, and from what limited amount I understand, it seems interesting.. I'll admit, I have no experience in the world of blockchains and don't immediately see how Ponzu would be used in the hub / node / exchange diagram so to speak.

If you would be willing / able to share more with me about what you'd like to do and how Ponzu might fit into that plan I'd happily provide some direction on how to get Ponzu to do what you want it to -- or advise you to use a different approach ;)

[faddat]

I'm willing and able :).

So here's a little bit that I've written about the end-state goals of our work:

https://quip.com/PKG6A4P7RMqt

But please know that we're very much a WIP. Glogchain is designed to store state in a few different places.

• tendermint (financial tx & pointers to content in IPFS, which will get delivered in IPFS or webtorrent or bittorrent depending on how the user is accessing gloghain). We want to keep the chain as light as possible in order to keep things speedy.

• distributed db - this is the hardest, trickiest part by far! So Ponzu uses bolt, and that's the right way for it for sure. But now think that the end goal is to have many apps, all serving up one of those wonderful Ponzu'd APIs, from many servers. I still haven't quite figured out if each machine should hold all of the state, or if the distributed database should distribute the state. I prefer the distributed route but I haven't found anything that seems to fit this use case outside of -- possibly -- the javascript database called GunDB. Noms looks decent, but it does store all of the state on all of the machines, which may not be ideal. The distributed database should also keep things as light as possible. I'm now wondering if anyone has come up with a way to link BoltDBs together in an eventually consistent or even sharded fashion.

The distributed DB is for things like full-text search and the like.

• IPFS - Actual content as markdown / mp4 / mp3

I love what Ponzu does in terms of giving all of the latest tech to its user in a simple and clean fashion.

[nilslice]

@faddat - I apologize for not replying to this for so long.. it is great info and I need to look into all the projects you mention. I will, but I am in the midst of a relocation and have very little free time.. I have been doing more work recently with Ethereum smart contracts and think you are onto something interesting (based on how I understand your comments). I see now how Ponzu could offer a alternative backend, powered by blockchain (either public or private -- which opens up some interesting opportunities).

Somewhat related, if you're available/interested, I'd like to discuss the possibility of building a fully open-source "company" around Ponzu, possibly raising some funds via an ICO.. I think going to the ICO market with an actual product and existing community would be well-received.

I already have in the works some paid/premium business services like hosting, deeper API analytics, backups, and a few more products that would be very useful to Ponzu users. As the community and user-base grows, I believe a successful business could be build around it (much like Automattic around Wordpress).

Initially, I think there could be an ICO that would entitle owners to share of future profits generated by the premium services. The tokens/coins reserved by the "company" would additionally be an optional alternative to USD to pay developers who are interested in helping build needed features based on bounties for the jobs. The "company" would be a decentralized organization, and I'd be able to offer existing contributors coins for their work.

You're clearly quite involved and invested in the blockchain space, so it would be great to get your feedback if you have thoughts or ideas here.

[faddat]

I just underwent a move myself, and am looking to do same. How might we connect properly to put it into full gear?

The model for the ICO might be somewhat off, however. Typically, that is not how they work.

That said, the world needs decentralized web applications and ethereum really isn't the way to do it: it is just too slow.

If it were possible to tokenize storage into a distributed ponzu, that might be the way to go. Or to have a global chain that accepts yaml files describing what needs to be stored, and possibly where it needs to be stored. This could be a private chain application for a ponzu and tendermint mashup.

In short, yes, I am interested-- I have some of my own thoughts on an ico'd "company" that I'd love to share with you (hint: see webtorrent.io and then see youtube.com then look at tendermint's very first demo from way back in the eris industries days.

[faddat]

I do have thoughts or ideas. First off that isn't the usual manner for an ICO but you're right that this space is ready. I have been moving as well. I am going to fire off an e-mail to your boss sauce address, provided that I can find it.

Talk to you soon,
-Jake

Did I mention that boulder is #1 on my places to look at living in the US? How is it?

[nilslice]

@faddat - check your gitter notifications, we should be able to chat there. Or, email me at steve [at] bosssauce.it

Thanks!

[joeblew99]

Having read the requirements I think ponzu can do it. For scaling the system / sharing it out just need to use a basic choreography pattern.

Ponzu already has pre and post events, so you just need to stick NATS as a control plane so different ponzu shards can participate together in the choreography.

I might add that I really want to add materialised views to ponzu to make all the above easier and increase perf
This will also allow global CDN like distribution. It's not a big addition either

Happy to discuss further and try to get this distributed scaling into ponzu

[nilslice]

Having read the requirements I think ponzu can do it. For scaling the system / sharing it out just need to use a basic choreography pattern.

This would be a fairly new concept to me, so I apologize if it takes a bit more explaining to me in order for me to fully grasp. Do you have any recommended resources to look into the basics of these patterns?

Ponzu already has pre and post events, so you just need to stick NATS as a control plane so different ponzu shards can participate together in the choreography.

Sounds cool! I think we'd probably need to build in different hooks for this, since the default implementation on an item.Item is overridden when implemented by a Ponzu user. This, of course, is assuming you were referring to the item.Hookable interface with methods like AfterSave, etc. My understanding is that you'd propose we "echo" database actions throughout the network of chained ponzu's using these hook-like methods.

I might add that I really want to add materialised views to ponzu to make all the above easier and increase perf
This will also allow global CDN like distribution. It's not a big addition either

Yes, it's been something Ponzu has desperately lacked, and a direct result of there being no formal design of the Admin prior to me starting this project. However, now that the system/db package is pretty much set, creating the materialized views based on the existing routes in system/admin/server.go, it should be pretty straightforward. We'd need to update the UI to use templates (which really needs to be done anyway), since the code just inlines data with byte slices of UI.. 😅

Could you elaborate a bit more about the CDN-like distribution? You're referring to the distribution of synchronized ponzu instances correct?

Happy to discuss further and try to get this distributed scaling into ponzu

Great - should I start a "project" (like Trello board) on this repository? @faddat - would love to get your thoughts on this too. I think NATS, like @joeblew99 mentions, would be a good option for the synchronization between instances, but could Tenderment also achieve this or are they totally separate concepts?

[olliephillips]

Closing this issue. No activity. Please reopen if need to.