Development Update – November 2020

For those who may ask what’s going on at the development, here’s a short update on what we’re working behind the scenes.

1. Switch to CMake

With the approval and merge of pull request #240 [1] a big refactoring came onto the develop branch. We streamlined the whole build behaviour to use CMake [2]. The main idea and goal behind this refactoring is the simplification of the build at all and to disconnect from external (binary) dependencies as much as possible. To do so, additional helper scripts were implemented, which handle the creation of the target binaries. During this refactoring we updated the used Boost library and LevelDB library to their latest version. Also for Linux we now build most of the required dependencies right with the helper scripts and create semi-static binaries. “Semi-static” because with Qt and Tor there are two exceptions. The next release will be built this way.

2. Continuous Integration Infrastructure

One of the important development tasks is to reduce our monthly cost. The biggest part here is the Continuous Integration system on AWS. So we’ve had no other solution than to shut it down for now. 🙁 As we still need continuous builds and thanks to the dockerized setup of the whole build system, for the time being it was possible to set up a completely new CI environment on private infrastructure. This transition is not finished yet as there are a lot of things need to be finetuned.

3. Android wallet

With the open beta release in the Google App Store, an important milestone was achieved. We are dependent on feedback of our beta testers, for improving the app but also to find issues concerning specific android devices. 

An important improvement implemented this month was making the blockchain bootstrap process more reliable. Instead of one big file (1.6GB), the bootstrap is splitted into chunks of 100MB. The android app downloads these bootstrap parts one by one. If a download fails, the app tries to redownload that part again, until all parts are successfully received. 

Atm the source code for our Android app, is a branch from our main wallet. It’s using 99% of the same code as the desktop wallet, but with enough differences that this code can’t be used for the desktop as well. It is planned to make the android branch compatible with the desktop wallet, so that only one version of code must be maintained to support all platforms.

4. Android wallet automated build

In preparation of the automated build of the Android wallet, we just started with the first details around the required steps to produce the delivery for the PlayStore. Stay tuned!

Links
[1] https://github.com/aliascash/alias-wallet/pull/240
[2] https://cmake.org/

Want to contribute?
Anyone and everyone is welcome to contribute to our code on GitHub, and they will all go through the same process of multi-dev peer review and will be if it gets enough ACKs 

If it does get merged, you could receive a contribution bonus depending on its contribution level.

Major Development Targets
(subject to change and is never a complete list)

Q4 2020 – New Android Wallet
Q1 2021 – One codebase or all platforms.
Q2 2021 – Cold staking analysis
Q3 2021 – Cold staking implementation
Q4 2021 – Cold staking release

Please also check our roadmap page for more info on what else is planned.