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Neptune Block Explorer Design notes

Initial functionality

  • show tip info (digest, height, etc)
  • lookup block by selectors: height, digest, genesis, tip
  • display block info
  • something about generation addresses. (ask Alan, todo)
  • lookup UTXO, show #of confirmations. (todo) confirm utxo is confirmed

Block Explorer RPC calls

  • tip_info
  • block_info
  • utxo_info

Neptune RPC calls to support Block Explorer

  • tip_info
  • block_info
  • utxo_info

Architecture

Block Explorer is comprised of:

  • Server:
    • RPC Server (backend)
    • GUI Server (for serving html/js/wasm)
  • Client:
    • Web Client (browser, mobile, etc)
    • Rpc Client (browser, any 3rd party app)

RPC Server and GUI Server are logical components of the same server instance. The server is built with axum framework.

Server goals:

  • provide basic "block explorer" functionality
  • fast response times
  • public access: no authentication necessary, read-only.
  • simple maintainable code
    • RPC Specific:
      • simple self-documenting public APIs
      • keep response data small. avoid huge responses
    • GUI Specific:
      • simple, hand-crafted, maintainable HTML
      • javascript-free

GUI Server is built with:

  • axum for server/routing
  • boilerplate for templates with embedded rust
  • pico-css for responsive light/dark themes, js free.

For simplicity and efficiency, the GUI Server calls neptune-core APIs directly rather than calling the neptune-explorer RPC APIs over http or internally.

Client/Server communication

Server and Client communicate via http/RPC or http/html. The initial RPC mechanism is REST using axum's built-in rest support. REST has the benefit that it can be accessed via a web-browser. We may add JSON-RPC support later.

Future Clients

It is envisioned that more advanced clients may be created in the future. For example something like Dioxus or Leptos could be used to create client(s) for WASM, mobile, desktop, and perhaps even tui/cli. Such client(s) should live in their own repo and communicate with the block-explorer server only via RPC.