The existing NFS, DNS IPC APIs are to be ported to RESTFul APIs in the first version.
This will allow us to quickly develop a Drive application which shall interface with Launcher; this will initially be instead of a mounted drive. Going with a standalone application for now will allow us to quickly develop and use the Drive application to test the network with some real data. Below is a mockup for the Drive application that @Scott has been working on.

Very interesting coin. I will follow the developments. Luck developer.

Happy 2016! we thought we would share some of what has happened during the holidays (not all of us took a break) and what we have planned for the next few weeks. I would also like to welcome onboard a few more new dev team members; Adam joined us in December; @AndreasF came onboard this week and @Shankar will start in a few weeks time - Welcome to MaidSafe and the SAFE Network guys! So with almost everyone back at their keyboards and with extra dev firepower joining the team, we thought it would be good to share our plans for the next few weeks. Ultimately all these tasks are still focused on delivering RUST-5 and to enable community testing to begin.

What is the status of this coin please?

POR farming ready yet?

As @dirvine stated yesterday in a Dev Update leak :wink: Routing: the patient is now stable and off the critical list, this is now very much the case with brilliant progress made this week, which has been borne out in real testing. We have run 65 (one more than group size) nodes with a close group size of 8 on droplets, all nodes could populate close group number of nodes in their routing tables. :smile: This is a significant breakthrough and a testament to the hard work of the team. Does it mean we are fully out of the bug infested woods? Nearly, but not quite. Over to @Fraser for the detail.....

The Troon office feels fully operational again this week as people return from being ill, holidays and visit from the other side of the planet. Decent progress is being made on the Routing bugs as outlined in last week's Dev Update1 and progress can still be tracked via commits in the cleanup branch of Routing3. As soon as we have eliminated the bugs and have a functioning Routing example again, I am sure the core guys that have been living and breathing the Routing cleanup, will want to shout this from the nearest mountain top5, or alternatively and a lot easier just update everyone here on the forum. While this Routing debugging work continues not everything has ground to a complete halt in the other libraries or elsewhere in MaidSafe.

So in Crust work continues on a couple of fronts, one of these is the Crust speedup RFC1. When the Crust maintainers are happy with this RFC PR, it shall be moved into ‘Proposed’ and implementation JIRA tasks raised, once these are complete this RFC will be ‘Active’. The work on this RFC shall happen in a new Git branch, so as not to hinder the Routing progress, nor the RUST-5 deliverables in any way. In parallel to this, work is on-going with RUST-UTP and the Devs are collaborating with the owners of that crate to get a UTP connect function rock solid (and always passing tests) from a Crust perspective. The guys have done a great job tracing an issue we originally believed existed in Crust and hunted down the problem to RUST-UTP and are now cooperating with the authors to resolve this.

Heading up the stack; progress continues preparing for the resolution of the Routing implementation issues. Last week the client guys worked on the Firefox addon feasibility, to eradicate the FFI binding that was previously used and to switch to the Firefox XPCOM components to connect with the launcher. Also work to expose an API to the DOM layer so that the API could allow dynamic applications to be built begun, however these are just the initial steps of proof of concept (POC) to showcase the feasibility.

To make the above POC integrated with the actual addon, we are working on an RFC to allow authenticated access from the addon. Also a few DNS APIs must be exposed from the launcher side to enable the serving of content from the addon, thus an RFC is being worked on to outline what is required.

There was a request on another forum thread3 to expose the API from launcher to allow managing StructuredData and Immutable data. A RFC is pending1 in regards to this request. Another RFC in the pipeline from the client guys is a slight design change, currently public functions exposed from the safe_nfs crate are blocking calls. The Devs believe it would be better to change them to a non-blocking implementation. So a bunch of RFCs and PRs flowing from the guys, in order to make life easier for SAFE App developers.

The website has seen a significant overhaul with the design and implementation guys working hard to provide a rich, fresh and informative end user orientated site. All of the design tasks are now complete; with the final tweaks being implemented and internally reviewed this week. This is the first of two new planned websites, the other being aimed at developers.

As the end user portion of the site stands, there are now four main pages. These main pages are: Features, Safecoin, Company and FAQs.

Features outlines some of the key features of the SAFE network to new and novice users. It gets them up to speed on some of the main problems with existing internet infrastructure and provides an introduction to some of our solutions.

The Safecoin page shares a lot of the goals with features and since safecoin is such an important part of the SAFE network, it needed it's own page. The goal here is not to give advanced users in-depth knowledge of the implementation, but to simply be enough to peek an interest in new novice users and direct them where to find out more.

Company page does pretty much what you would expect and provides an outline of our goals and motivations as a company, as well as including a careers section and the dreaded staff images, you have been warned :smile:

FAQs has been changed from what was originally conceived as a hub for support. It has now been scaled back to an FAQ page and as a place to channel interested users to the community forum and media wiki sites to gain more information. One of the reasons for scaling this back is that kicking off later this week will be a project to seriously tackle Documentation or our lack thereof. We understand that useful, up-to-date documentation is lacking and has been an area we have neglected for way too long. So a new team is being created to tackle this, areas they plan to cover include: Libraries (core and app help); Apps (illustrations, tutorials, etc); API (scope of the launcher and what it provides for Apps); Blogs (for example a series presenting each core library by the maintainers themselves is one idea); Samples and finally Tutorials. So hopefully more news to follow on this after the team meets for the first time this week.

So still moving steadily in the right direction, no TADA! :tada: just yet, just stay on the lookout for sleep deprived developers rushing toward the summit of a Scottish mountain.

Has there been any discussion of creating a search engine or something similar?

Once the network is live, how will people know which websites are online?

BUGS!!! I should just end the update here, as bugs are challenging the team, both software bugs and health related bugs. For most of the already depleted team (bloody bugs) time is being spent identifying and squashing Routing bugs as well as improving error handling to make these less likely and easier to resolve in the future. This is not the kind of Dev Update we like to deliver, nor the type you probably want to read, however it is what has been happening in the last week. So we all have to open wide and take our medicine….

75% of the Engineers are working in Routing, identifying issues and creating a roadmap to get to a successful implementation. These issues are taking longer to resolve than previous bugs as between RUST-3 and RUST-5 some code has been uncovered that will not allow for a stable network to be implemented and this is currently being addressed. The work is happening in a branch called cleanup27 for those interested in closely following progress......

Recent history aside, should we expect the MAID price to be coupled to BTC or USD long-term?  Perhaps the answer is USD since it wouldn't make sense for PUTting data on the network to become 10x more expensive when the BTC price increases 10x, right?  That would mean we can expect the MAID/BTC price to decrease whenever the BTC/USD price increases.

As for the recent sprint which has just finished, we unfortunately didn’t achieve all our objectives. There are more specific details about the individual targets below, but there was success for the Client libraries, the QA tasks and the Vault bugs. Crust and Routing which fell short did however make decent progress during the sprint, with unforeseen issues causing the bulk of the delays.

SAFE Launcher, a gateway for the apps to communicate with the SAFE Network on behalf of the user, is now ready as a library. This is great news for app devs as it abstracts the working knowledge of the SAFE Network entirely from them. All the app devs are required to do is to go through and make use of the very friendly JSON IPC documentation in the RFC repository3. Apps can be written in any language and as long as they adhere to a simple authentication mechanism, they can talk to Launcher using JSON requests and leave it to Launcher to carry out the actual tasks.

It would be better if someone from MAID could give us some light about the whole masterxchange thingy.