district0x Dev Update - November 28th, 2017

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The past two weeks have been dedicated to medium-size feature development for Name Bazaar, along with a few major bugfixes. Several initiatives to refactor pieces of code needed for d0xINFRA have also been underway.

As we look to begin expanding our development efforts and parallelize addition of new districts and modules, we are seeking to add more developers to the team. If you have experience in Clojurescript, Solidity, or think you’d be a good fit, please shoot us an email with your work history and qualifications at hello@district0x.io.

Name Bazaar Updates

Bugfixes

Last time we discussed upgrades we made to allow Name Bazaar to serve all kinds of webcrawlers. Unfortunately, this caused an issue with overly-aggressive caching for regular user sessions, resulting in stale data. This has been resolved, so dApp users will always get real-time data.

In Progress

Work on the name management page continues. This will serve as a much more effective hub for users and shoppers looking to manage or browse many owned names easily. With name resolution logic now complete, we expect to have the rest finished before the next development update.

Additionally, as promised, work has begun on a name registration flow for Name Bazaar. This will allow Name Bazaar users to register any unregistered ENS name similar to the registrar dApp or MyEtherWallet’s integration, directly within Name Bazaar. This process requires we carefully craft the user experience in order to simplify and improve upon the alternatives that already exist.

What’s Next?

Throughout development efforts in the past two weeks, a discussion has been raised around how we store data, and the opportunity to migrate away from SQL before we become over-committed to one implementation.

In response, we’ve decided to transition from using entirely SQL to Datascript, an in-memory database and datalog engine, built entirely in Clojure and Clojurescript. This will not only happen for Name Bazaar, but is a fundamental change provided to the structure of d0xINFRA and will effect all future districts utilizing that backend.

It’s exciting that as a young and early project we still have the ability to remain flexible with these kind of design choices, and adjust course whenever we encounter one.