Please describe your proposed solution.
This proposal is CBIA’s first official mission of contributing to the Cardano developer ecosystem. From our initial calls, we identified a need to foresee update issues by having better visibility of infrastructure components’ compatibility and interdependence in the Cardano ecosystem.
The Cardano Foundation Developer Portal already includes an extensive list of Cardano infrastructure components and other tools or dApps. <https://developers.cardano.org/tools>
The proposed solution will enhance this list’s format with details about compatibility and interdependencies between the listed items.
This will be done through attributes, such as Protocol version compatibility, that will be recorded as a ‘Trait’ of each component.
The new data will enable projects to clearly see updates for the components they depend on, and identify which other components depend on themselves.
We will then use this data to construct explorable visualizations and a Trait matrix table to facilitate insights across tools and dApps.
We believe this solution will make the Cardano network’s tooling relationships more comprehensible, and contribute to making our ecosystem considerably more versatile.
IOG’s Cardano node, although important, is not the only root for all downstream updates. Some tools start depending on alternative implementations of protocol clients. Between CBIA members there is a Rust implementation [Tx.Pipe], a Go implementation [Blink Labs], and a TypeScript implementation [hLabs] in the making that we trust will contribute to diversifying the communities of developers contributing to Cardano, strengthening our network’s foundations.
Also, further downstream, this solution will enable dependency insight at an intermediate level of tools (e.g. data providers), identifying and documenting relevant ‘Traits’ at this level. More about Traits and data+viz mocks here.