Hi Everyone,

Firstly let me apologise for posting this week’s update so late, everyone is very busy working towards release and one week seems to blur into the next just now. However, excuses aside, updating this community is very important to us so I will stop wittering and get on with the update…

Drive / Encrypt

Encryptor has now been completely refactored to provide a much faster and solid user experience with data to and from the network, particularly through the Drive interface. Encrypt now has a strong exception guarantee, which is an important step.

Bjorn is refactoring the Drive library to be more Posix compliant and with stronger exception guarantees. On completion this will lead to an Nfs filesystem API that will allow developers to write apps as though local to a filesystem with a native look and feel as well as simply using the cross platform virtual filesystem. This change will open up the App developer API significantly and allow pretty much any app to be created without requiring a VFRS; a huge step.

rUDP Improvement - Testnet 1

Work continues on rUDP improvement. The performance regression and security holes from the previous reliability improvement should have been closed. Testing that security really is okay begins this week.

Routing - Testnet 1

Resolved a blocking issue related with Routing object’s destruction, causing undefined behaviour with callbacks and hanging threads.

Vault / NFS - Testnet 1

Partially fixed false positive PutVersionResponse message in Vaults. The remaining part will be addressed by updates to NFS (throwing exceptions on timeout and cancelled tasks).

Resolved a couple of algorithm issue related to holders calculation, which affects account transfer. Such resolvement exposed other bugs hidden by the previous over-spread of account data. This brings the behaviour of vaults more in line with expected / designed behaviour.

QA

Testnet 1 - pushing updated code, monitoring, managing infrastructure and recording bugs / debugging. We are looking to automate the creation and destruction of testnets as much as we can and also push auto updates to the testnets. As the team grows and we can no longer just wheel over to each other (some do this more gracefully than others) to peer review code prior to commits, it has been recognised that a more formal / controlled and automated procedure needs to be put in place. Tools are being investigated and discussions taking place to implement such a process. Ben has also joined us this week - he has hit the ground running and is a very welcome addition to the team.

Miscellaneous (Visualiser / CI / API, etc) - Testnet 1

Created a backend for the testnet status tool.

Documented the authentication example.

Implemented updates to API project.

Refactored CI test to use unified method of connecting to a given testnet.

Fixed data getter destruction issue.

Recruitment Update

Recruitment is ongoing and we have three very high level candidates undergoing testing at this time. These candidates are writing code that will prove their capability. We are immensely impressed so far. This is a significant move. We have confirmed one more c++ dev that will focus on client API and in particular multi language bindings. This will start on Sep 1st. That dev will be joined with a javascript / nodejs senior dev around that time (or maybe sooner). This will allow the Visualiser to actually provide feedback on packet movement through the network (testnets and beyond with our own test nodes on the live network). This work is invaluable.

Roadmap

Find our Roadmap here > https://github.com/maidsafe/MaidSafe/wiki/Roadmap