Current State of Networking?

Technical Discussion App Development
#1

Hey all,

We’re getting to a point with our app that we want to try out real networking between production conductors. What’s the state of development on that? Can someone point me to the latest information on how best to get it working?

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#2

Hi Ezra, the latest information and the best way to follow progress about networking is to review the pull requests on the lib3h repo. https://github.com/holochain/lib3h/pulls

What’s the state of networking? --> Lib3h is not yet connected with production conductors.

Check out the progress made with the GhostActor Multiplexer.

This is the latest status on networking. The networking team is making a lot of progress as I was at their sprint demo session today.

Did this response answer your question? Other questions? Let us know. Regards

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#3

That is very helpful! But it also seems like a lot of reading to get a sense of what’s going on – I think what we’d really like to know is if there’s a way to get networking working well enough for demo purposes right now. Sounds like maybe the answer to that is not quite yet? What about on older versions that still use n3h?

#4

A simple status dashboard would be ideal. Correct, networking is not ready for demo purposes or for app developers yet. I will be sure to keep you posted/updated on progress. Everything is moving to lib3h so it’s best to not use n3h.

#5

Would be great to get some details on what the blockers are with networking at the next AMA.

Is Holo a factor in the delay? If so, why is that affecting networking in Holochain?

#6

Is it safe to assume that just using hc run --networked isn’t going to work, then? We’re still on 0.0.22-alpha1 right now, but might be willing to switch if the --networked tag or something else works short term.

#7

Yeah I don’t see how that is going to work given a lot of the networking development has not been pushed out yet. I imagine this will change over the next several months. I have asked someone else to test out hc run --networked. I am curious how far along are you with the front-end development? Front-end is important and I recommend people spend time designing an excellent UI/UX.

#8

We’ll certainly share and provide progress updates over time. Holo Host is an app and it’s development does not impact networking. Different teams are working on networking and app development.

#9

Will there be something like getConnectedPeers that the Conductor exposes to instances? Similar to IPFS peers list, but per running instance

#10

I’m interested in MapReduce functionality for distributed processing, which I believe could be built on this very easily with call

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#11

there is an n3h compatible conductor version that should provide basic networking

the maturity of that should be enough to unblock zome development and testing but not enough for “production” deployment

if that isn’t working, can we continue the thread over in the holonix discussion?

lib3h has not much to do with holo (other than holo obviously needs it to work as much as everyone else) - check out how it relates to the conductor builds here https://docs.holochain.love/docs/holochain/

the reason it stopped working is that the people working on the conductor want to roll weekly releases and the people working on the lib3h crate made changes to the messaging protocol between conductor/networking that n3h hasn’t been (and likely won’t be) updated to the new protocol

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Basic usage of conductors
#12

there are now some additional rust options in sim2h and sim1h that are in the latest conductor

#13

Any updates on the status of lib3h?

#14

Seconded! It’s great to see sim1h and sim2h, but I understand these are just for testing? We’ve got a p2p shim in our app right now for testing between machines, and we’d love to switch to using lib3h if it’s ready enough.

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#15

Hey @EzraWeller and @Brooks thanks for the inquiry.

@EzraWeller lib3h is not quite ready yet for apps.
We encourage you to bundle your App with Holoscape and this way you can test and check out sim2h. Try this approach and let us know how it turns out for you. Our core devs are committed to providing support for Holoscape if you try it and provide us feedback.

@EzraWeller is networking the most important piece for you right now?

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#16

Thanks, we’ll check that stuff out! Networking seems to be the most important thing that’s not already more or less working how we want it to, but we’re still in very early stages – other things are likely to come up :slight_smile:

This is our project: https://www.github.com/setmatchgames/squad

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#17

Thanks @dhtnetwork , I was looking for a tutorial that shows all the steps required for bundling into holoscape, “How to bundle your app for Holoscape” seems to point to the wrong site. - Is that the correct link?

#18

Hi Tom, a tutorial does not exist yet. The best place is the repo.

The link goes to an example bundle. Is the example enough for you? It looks like you posted in two places about this. The Holoscape thread is a good stop.

#19

@dhtnetwork let me know if you’d like me to move this to another thread. Tagging some folks that may know the answer to this: @lucksus, @pauldaoust

I am in the midst of working on a proof of concept for networking a holochain app with a Flutter UI. I’m able to run two conductors on my machine and have the instances communicate, but whenever we try to run on separate machines, the instances aren’t communicating. It’s as though we are running our own private chains with no gossip.

I believe I’m missing something in my understanding of the networking, but perhaps the networking isn’t mature enough for this test?

Info:

  • Both instances are running the same dna.json with the same hash.
  • I’ve tried using the public sim2h server as well as n3h networking with the same result.
  • All entries are public and retrievable by the instance that created them. (Not retrievable by another instance)
  • I would use holoscape to try it out, but we don’t have a web UI, so we are doing this manually.
  • I’m running the conductors in nix-shell, holochain --version 0.0.38-alpha14, hc --version 0.0.38-alpha14.

Let me know if you need code samples.

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#20

Hi @J-Krush, just spoke with HC Core team about the general networking topic. I wanted to confirm that networking between two instances/separate machines should be working as of 0.0.40-alpha release. Have you tried that?

Please note that the HC Core team is working on the 0.0.41-alpha release. This should happen this week.