Holochain development progress and the roadmap for Holochain version updates

Author: Holochain

Compiled by: ChainCatcher

You may have noticed an increase in stories, blogs, applications, news, and announcements from Holo recently. This is largely because there is more that can be built on Holochain than ever before. The proof of this reality is that a broader project community and developers are beginning to rush into their respective projects. Meanwhile, the Holo development team has now been unblocked. Certain features had been on hold until Holochain completed updates to the necessary levels of functionality and stability. This is huge.

To give our community a clearer view of the order of our interdependent work, we have updated Holo's roadmap and included some key Holochain releases.

For clarity, we have renamed some milestones, but in most cases, we have included additional milestones to more effectively link our regular development updates with the milestones so that everyone can better understand where we are.

You will notice that we have now completed 9 milestones of Phase 3. The other 7 milestones are what we refer to as ongoing work, with each milestone being focused on by specific sub-teams. Each week, we comprehensively deliver features to the test network, provide usable builds for our community, and publicly release updates.

In the past month, the Holochain team released what we call the "Shard Ready" version. If you check it on GitHub, it is version 0.0.107. Since then, they have released two additional versions that consolidate and make these foundational changes available to community developers and the Holo team. These versions of Holochain are exactly what participants in the Dev Camp are now using to build, test, and deploy their own Holochain applications.

The tail end of the Holochain version also provides some amazing tools. The Launcher, our scaffolding tool, and Dev Hub make it easier for developers to adopt Holochain by saving their work and shortening their learning curve.

The Holochain Launcher is a dashboard that allows end users to locally install and run Holochain applications. This means Holochain applications are easy to demonstrate and easy to configure for QA teams and community members to test—ultimately, non-technical users can also easily install and start running them on their own computers.

The scaffolding tool is the first in a set of rapid application development tools—known as RAD tools in the software world. The scaffolding tool provides a quick start to the application building process. It allows new developers to rely on patterns designed by other more mature Holochain developers. It will also allow non-developers, as part of product teams, to set up the basics of applications using business terminology and logic. For example, if you are designing a blog, you can define concepts like posts and post lists in the scaffolding tool.

In Section 3 of the Dev Camp, they introduced the RAD scaffolding tool to participants and then assigned them homework to build their first Holochain application. After that, they will package the application and run it from the launcher.

DevHub is another tool that some of our community developers are testing. It is a developer console where hApps can be uploaded and tested, and other ecosystem developers can review/rate them. This component is crucial for Holo, as our publisher portal will view it as the source for all Holochain applications that can be published to the Holo network for hosting.

This week, our team has just updated all the various applications and services related to the Holo platform to the Shard Ready version of Holochain. This means that Holo hApps and Infrastructure are now using a version of Holochain that exceeds all our previous benchmark performance metrics compared to the earlier Elemental Chat version.

There is so much ongoing work—so we added a small overlay to the roadmap showing the following parts we are already working on.

Yes, with the performance improvements of Holochain, we are now preparing to let people use Elemental Chat on Holo. We are currently finalizing the testing and release process, so stay tuned for announcements.

The Holo team is steadily developing the first pre-release version of the Publisher Portal and the release version of the HoloFuel application with Test Fuel basic transactions. The development of these two applications had previously been paused because certain features required changes in Holochain, which are now available through the recent Holochain updates.

Holochain is preparing for its first release of version 0.1.x. This indicates a higher level of usability and reliability. Our versioning is based on semantic versioning standards, where the first number is the major version, the second is the minor version, and the third is the patch. Whenever a project moves more than one decimal place in a launch project, it is a milestone worth celebrating, as it typically indicates increased stability and documentation for developers relying on that project.

Another ongoing effort by the Holo team is the new key generation process for HoloPorts. This work will modify the current HoloPort registration process, adding key security steps and making the process more scalable for our operations team and hosts registering. This will enable us to specifically build additional features needed for the beta, such as multi-port registration and authentication.

As we move forward today, we are entering a more complex time for our community and customer support staff. So far, during most of our development cycle, we have had two groups of users—hosts and Holochain developers. Others interested in the project want to know about the possibilities of this new technology, what is available, how it works, and many others want to better understand its relationship with our tokens and ultimately with HoloFuel. However, in the past month, we have seen a variety of new tools and applications being used by more developers, and now there are end users of the applications built by these developers.

This means that non-developers are asking more questions in our support channels and forums. As we pre-release HoloFuel and the Publisher Portal, along with other projects offering more Holochain applications on the Launcher, this will only increase. We will work with the community to find ways to direct these questions to all the right places.

So, thank you for all your interest and participation—and especially for your patience as we go through these wonderful growing pains.