tezblock Weekly Update #3

The weekly update for the current state and progress of the tezblock MVP development. Our goal is to include the community as much as possible along the way.

We’ve continued our work on development, testing and design in the last few days. If you’re interested what happened last week, you can take a look at the tezblock Weekly Update #2.

For this update we take a closer look at the summary of our evaluation process for the protocol indexer.

Tezos Protocol Indexer Requirements Engineering

With the focus on a release date of the MVP as soon as possible, we’ve decided early on in the requirements engineering process that we’ll evaluate existing protocol indexer solutions for the data instead of building something from scratch.

Keeping in mind that it should be possible at a later stage to switch out the whole indexer and use a different one from what we’ve selected initially for the MVP.

Summary — Evaluation Of Protocol Indexer

The following is the result of this process during which we have evaluated three existing Tezos protocol indexers.

A list of pros and cons for each indexer:

lib_indexer

Pro — Is built by Nomadic Labs and is close to the client source code, therefore most likely kept up to date in the future

Con — Currently still in draft phase, no actual implementation is available. Communication from the team that it will not be ready and Conseil should be considered

Conseil

Pro — Increasing adoption in the community

Pro — Extensive documentation regarding setup and usage.

Pro — Very extensible queries, therefore support for many different use cases

Neutral — Project funded through grant, development could be stopped or taken closed source

Kiln

Pro — Increasing adoption in the community

Con — Not all features that are required are available at the moment

Neutral — Project funded through grant, development could be stopped or taken closed source

The Result

After reviewing all 3 projects, the decision was made to use Conseil because of the mature state of the project and the flexible API. Conseil supports all of the use cases tezblock will need in an MVP, but should also cover most use cases of later stages with minimal effort.