Progress Overview:
- Improved Connectivity: Recent changes have allowed peers to establish more connections, even when multiple gateways are involved. Although not fully complete, connectivity between peers is progressing well, and extensive testing will continue to ensure robustness.
- UI Enhancements: A new UI is being developed to monitor and debug the network. This will aid in integration testing, making it easier to identify and fix issues in real-time, and will be helpful as we prepare for the release.
- Network Operations Testing: Local testing of basic network operations (e.g., boot, update, subscribe) has shown positive results, with most issues resolved. The next focus is on addressing remaining test failures and improving reliability.
Challenges and Solutions:
- Test Failures: A few test failures persist, particularly edge cases related to dropping packets. Addressing these failures is a priority to ensure network stability and minimize flakiness.
- Complex Changes: Some recent challenges stemmed from introducing numerous changes at once without thorough testing. Moving forward, the team will emphasize end-to-end testing and ensure comprehensive test coverage to prevent regressions.
- Macro Implementation for Composable State: Work continues on a macro to simplify composable state management in contracts, which aims to enforce better signature verification and streamline development.
What’s Next:
- Testing and Release Prep: Focus remains on fixing test failures and updating tests to match recent changes, as well as deploying the latest version to the test network for live testing.
- Tooling and Deployment: After the initial release, attention will turn towards improving the toolchain for deploying, versioning, and upgrading contracts—key for a smooth developer experience in the future.
Group Chat System Update:
- Chat Room Development: Progress is being made on a group chat application, focusing on making contract state composable and easy to manage. Initial UI work is complete, with real-time updates being rendered based on the contract state.
- Next Steps for Chat App: Integrating backend interaction and testing live contract subscriptions and updates will be the next stage of development. Existing work from the email app will serve as a guide for this integration.
Outlook: The Freenet project is nearing a significant milestone, with a potential release soon. The team is focusing on stability, testing, and refining user interfaces to provide a more developer-friendly experience.