CryptoCoin Explorer Version 4.0 Development Announcement

[dreamwatcher]

www.cryptocoinexplorer.com



This month starts the development stage of CCE 4.0.

CCE 4.0 will be a major rewrite of large portions of CCE 3.5.

Internal Goals:

Improve efficiency of database loading and sorting

Increase speed of the web server module.

Decrease size and improve database structure and indexes.


Tentative New/Modified Features:

Sponsor/Developer explorer customization.  Sponsor/Developers will be able to change the look and feel of the explorer whenever they wish.
Attributes like background image, coin image, table elements (border,backgrounds and text), and button/hyper-link settings. Each page and table will be independently set.

The developer message box will be replaced with a whole developer/sponsor set page and explorer home page headline.

Ability to parse and display TX messages in chains that support it.

Add country of IP address in the coin daemon peers page. Removal of port display after IP address as it is not useful information.

Plain text list of IP addresses for easy cut/paste into configuration files.
Plain text display option for block,transaction, rich list, and ledger pages.

Table sorting options.

Add ABE compatible API alongside the current CCE API. Improve the output of some of the more complex data returns from the CCE API.

Graphing of certain statistics.

More features are being considered. If anybody has any requests for other features, please post here!


A new official forum topic for general discussion of CCE has been made: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=922515.0

[PIMPdev]

Nice, only request is to ask you to consider adding pimpcash
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=871506.0

Thanks and best of luck with the upgrade!

[Tranz]

Cool 4.0! I like some of the enhancements you have proposed.

One thing that I always thought that would be cool, was an historical USD/BTC price. So when the block is created, the prices of HBN->BTC and BTC->USD is recorded on the CCE.

[dreamwatcher]

An update of what has been going on behind the scenes with CCE 4.

All the updates so far are "under the hood".

The database has been restructured and enlarged.

Better organization and indexing for quicker queries.

Tables added to track a large amount of statistics and information

Orphan blocks and transactions are now stored instead of discarded. This will allow the lookup of orphan chains and can be very useful to developers.
 
Difficulty, number of transactions in total and by address, basic market conditions, coin minting, network hash rate and many other statistics are recorded and stored every database refresh cycle. Transaction messages can also be stored.
   
In 3.5 many of these statistics are not historically stored, but only the current value is stored and displayed.
   
"Raw" versions of blocks and transactions are being stored and will be available to users.


Much of the work so far has been in the code itself most of which would be of little interest to the average user.

Quick off the top of my head summary:
Code cleaning of left over code from various hot patches.
Implementation of my current coding technique regarding function status and data passing.
Graceful handling of various error conditions that some hot patches handled in rather ham fisted way.
Various changes to the database connection handler.
Bug fixes for bugs I had not realized until recently. For example, the strange way Mysql handles large floats (past the 8-9th whole digit)
Improved RPC communication system
Improved orphan handing, including the storage of orphan information and better handing of chain reorganizations especially when reorganized to a shorter chain.
Much more Graceful exiting when things go horribly wrong.

And much more, but I would think it would only serve to put the reader to sleep.


I have also preformed testing on the Bitcoin 0.10.0 RPC with CCE 3.5 and CCE 4.0 and everything appears to work as before.

Currently Working on:

More under the hood code improvements...

Next up:
Merged mining information parsing ,storage and display.

Html Improvements:
Plain text list of peer addresses and plain text pages for blocks and transactions.
Adding country flags to peer webpage
ABE compatible API alongside the current CCE API.
Add API command "getvaildhashes" which is used by android coin wallets.
Change some of the larger CCE API command outputs to a more standard format.


Once this groundwork is laid in the visual and user functions can be added.
A few of these items include:
Customizable appearance.
Statistical charting
Timezone setting

Ideas being considered:

User accounts that would allow a user to customize page layouts and a page of information on
addresses they have registered or other information they wish to track.

A basic free explorer supported by donations advertisements. This explorer would be a VERY basic version of CCE, with a VERY basic API.



There is still more to come, but this post has gotten long enough.

There is still time to code new ideas into CCE 4.0, so please post or PM with any ideas you might have.


I am hoping that the first beta test will be publicly available in a few weeks.

 

[dreamwatcher]

I know it appears that CCE 4 is taking a long time in development, but I want to make sure that everything is running as good as possible and future improvements will not involve the amount of rewriting I am doing from 3.5 to 4.0. It took a couple of months to decide the final structure of the database loader for 4.0. The database loader is only half the equation, the web server is now the development focus and the part that will tested in the in public beta. I guess if one good thing came out of the retro fitting of 4.0, it is that the database loader code will be well tested even before the live beta.

I have decided to release a base version of the  database loader for 4.0 as open source. I have been taking time with the database loader (and its associated modules) to make it open source friendly.
This will most likely be released at the same time CCE 4 is deployed to take advantage of the PR opportunity. I think people might be surprised at how small the modules are for the loader, but it has always been one of my goals to create explorer code as lite as possible in both length and resources. There are 4 modules that make up the database loader and combined are just shy of 800 lines. I still have more to do with the statistics module, but what will be released in the open source version is there. The CCE 3.5 web server, which is the base of writing the CCE 4.0 web server, is composed of two modules and combined is a bit over 800 lines.

There are so many options being added to CCE 4 that most likely it will be offered in a tiered format. From very basic free explorers (text like with only a couple, if any, API commands) with advertisement type funding to a top tier with things like blockchain downloads updated weekly, coin client downloads, user accounts, advanced API features for statistics and "lite" clients , user and developer explorer customizations, coin website hosting and much more. Much of this is covered in https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=922521.0
Once a larger chunk of the new features is finalized, I will  post them in the CCE 4.0 thread. Please offer any ideas for features you might want in that thread.

The point is, CCE 4 is going to be a different beast from CCE 3.5. It is turning out to be a complete rewrite. I believe in the end, it will be worth the wait.