district0x Dev Update - March 31st, 2020

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The past two weeks for the district0x organization have mostly included direct continuations of the projects we had mentioned in our last update. Materially, most output has been in the form of wireframe revisions for the District Designer, testing and bugfixing for the Infura implementation on the District Registry, and continuing with progress on Ethlance’s front end and server.

District Registry

The District Registry has been the testbed for our previously mentioned node migration to Infura. The last few weeks have been a pretty straightforward application of our QA methodology. Deploying these changes to our QA instance immediately revealed some problems with district submission. Once these issues were fixed, the dApp could be repopulated and more thoroughly tested.

More minor issues were uncovered, some that would certainly affect the rest of our applications with Infura deployed. Among these, one involving EIP-55 and how our server ingests and queries for addresses and their casing was resolved. Additionally, we recently encountered a new bug where the in-app transaction history module was appearing empty. This module is shared across several dApps, and we left off this week trying to find an elegeant solution to this problem.

District Designer

The District Designer remains entirely within the scope of wireframing for current development. After revising the marketplace modules, we’ve gone back to the editor side of things. As previously mentioned, this part of the application was initially a bit too complicated for a brand new user to digest intuitively. Most of the work we’ve been pouring into the designer then has involved removing of stripping features down to their bare essentials while trying to optimize the visual flow and presentation as much as possible. This work will continue for another cylce or two before we have finalized wireframes to bring forward into the visual design process, and hopefully share with the wider community.

Ethlance

The district0x service providers working on Ethlance have had a full range of tasks on their plate. First among these are the bug we were chasing chasing down as of our last update. This includes the UI router error that has now been resolved. We also redeployed the production version of Ethlance and tested a particular set of our old queries. This revealed a problematic reliance on Metamask due to a 5s timeout they place on contract calls.

While solutions were bubbling up for this problem, we continued working on unfinished parts of the server and syncer. Afforded some new clarity from the time we poured into schema rewrites in the previous weeks, we could leverage a new DB diagram to make continued progress on upgrading the Ethlance syncer to work with our latest contracts.

The coming weeks will involve quite a bit more testing on the Ethlance server, as well as the various Infura improvements we’ve been implementing throughout the rest of our application suite. Additionally, we’ll be moving to begin primary visual design for the District Designer.