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.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
Picking up right from the challenge brief, “make it easier to build and scale” is the main point of alignment. For by having a clear and declared view to the community of what each tool is reliant upon and compatible with will make it a lot easier to make decisions about upgrading your version of a tool, foreseeing in what downstream impacts you may incur, and facilitate bridging and communicating between project authors to align and support each other to propagate compatibility faster where it may bring value.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
- Increased pageviews of the current tools page - We will articulate with CF to gather website statistics for the relevant pages
- Pageviews for the new data visualization pages
- Data completeness statistics - Track how data for the new fields has been completed over time (whether by the CBIA team or tool authors via PRs);
- Projects adding their data - Track the amount/quality of PRs by tool authors
- Discussion and ideation contributions to further develop this solution - CBIA will open the discussion to the community to progress this initiative; Participation and interest will be measurable as a indicator of success and relevance;
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
CBIA will share the initiative and it’s outputs (detailed at the end of the [CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] proposal section) internally and externally to foster it’s adoption and data enrichment by tooling authors, namely through:
- CBIA outreach through our social media
- To CBIA Members, asking that they help disseminate awareness and raise adoption
- To our partners CF, IOG, Emurgo, for the same purpose
All work will be progressed as part of an existing open source Cardano Foundation repository.