acud / js-bumblebee

Bumblebee

Bumblebee is a native javascript proxy that uses bee as the underlying client to the Swarm. The main motivation behind this project is to provide an entry point for an improved developer experience, harnessing the strength of the javascript ecosystem, to create a native javascript implementation of Swarm.

Setup

git clone [email protected]:ethersphere/js-bumblebee && cd js-bumblebee
npm i

Usage

Bumblebee currently proxies the existing bee project, using only the chunk api to interact with the network. So currently, in order to start bumblebee, you're going to need to run a bee node too. This is until a native libp2p implementation is avail to inject into bumblebee in order to do individual chunk operations over the network.

About running a bee node, visit the official repo. Once that's done, run your bumblebee using the the bee api as a backend:

npm run build
node ./build/src/main.js

Bumblebee will try by default to connect to your bee node at localhost:8080. You can specify a different bee listener with:

node ./build/src/main.js --bee-endpoint "localhost:6060"

Have a look at ./src/config/config.ts for possible CLI flags. This is a moving target and as of such not documented here at this moment.

Architecture

Bumblebee aims to be the cornerstore of the javascript implementation of Swarm. As of such, it envisions maintaining purity of interfaces between backend bee and the javascript proxy, this is to enable future integration with a native libp2p implementation of the Swarm protocols.

At this present moment, the proposed architecture could be described with the following diagram:

BUMBLEBEE PHASE 1


+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                                           |
|    +------------+   +------------+  +-------------+  +-------------+   +---------------+  |
|    |            |   |            |  |             |  |             |   |               |  |
|    |   CRYPTO   |   |   SIGNER   |  |     SOC     |  |    FILE     |   |      PSS      |  |
|    |            |   |            |  |             |  |             |   |               |  |
|    +------------+   +------------+  +-------------+  +-------------+   +---------------+  |
|                                                                                           |
|    +----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+   |
|    |                   INTEROP WRAPPER / CHUNK ONLY OPERATIONS                        |   |
|    +----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+   |
|                                                                                           |
|    +----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+   |
|    |                                                                                  |   |
|    |                              BACKEND BEE CLIENT                                  |   |
|    |                                                                                  |   |
|    +----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+   |
|                                                                                           |
|    +----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+   |
|    |                                                                                  |   |
|    |                                    NETWORK                                       |   |
|    |                                                                                  |   |
|    +----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+   |
|                                                                                           |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The bumblebee client is obliged not to deviate from the chunk-only interop layer (provided by the Client interface). The model should be revisited should any deviations arise. The client should be able to implement all higher-level functionalities using the chunk interface only.

Further working assumptions:

• No persistent storage
• No in-memory caching
• No notion of p2p protocols
• Browser compatible, complemented by a CI flow that makes sure this property is preserved
• Components should be lean and ideally should be pulled out to separate repos as soon as possible

Contributing

Kindly read the styleguide here before PRing anything into the repo.

Etymology

This project is meant to harness higher-level abstractions and implementations over the lean bee client, hence the name Bumblebee, or in other words - an oversized bee :)