3.8 KiB
Changelog
v0.18.0
This release is a major one as we've added new features, fixed many of the old problems, improved the performance and code base and overhauled the documentation. OrbitDB is now more robust, easier to use, faster and comes with much awaited write-permissions feature.
This release contains API breaking changes with no backward compatibility! Read further and see the API documentation, examples and Getting Started Guide to learn more about the changes. Note that we don't use semver for the npm module, so be sure to lock your orbit-db dependency to the previous release if you don't want to upgrade.
Write-permissions
OrbitDB now has write-permissioned databases! \o/ This gives us verifiable, distributed databases and data structures enabling tons of new use cases and possibilities. User-owned data collections, feeds and lists, State and Payment Channels, and many more!
Permissions are defined by public keys and databases in OrbitDB support one or multiple write keys per database. Each database update is signed with a write-access key and the signature is verified by the clients against access control information. Next step is to extend the access control functionality to include read permissions. Read more about Access Control and Keys.
Addresses
OrbitDB databases, their name and ID, are now addressed through a naming scheme:
/orbitdb/Qmd8TmZrWASypEp4Er9tgWP4kCNQnW4ncSnvjvyHQ3EVSU/my/database/hello
Read more about Addresses.
Replication
The previous versions of OrbitDB had a flaky replication implementation which has been completely re-written for this release. We've made performance improvements and more importantly, peers now start syncing the database automatically and reliably.
Performance
Several performance improvements made throughout OrbitDB's code base together with latest IPFS we're seeing much better throughput numbers in benchmarks. There are still many improvements to be made!
Documentation and Examples
We've written a brand new Getting Started Guide to work as a tutorial and a place to understand OrbitDB's features and usage. The API documentation was also updated to reflect latest features and changes.
All examples were updated along with an updated UI for the browser demo. Another small browser demo was added and there's a TodoMVC with Orbitdb example in the works.
Code Base Improvements
Due to legacy reasons, OrbitDB previously used a wrapper module for IPFS called ipfs-daemon. We have removed and deprecated ipfs-daemon and are now using js-ipfs directly!
We've switched to using async/await in the code base throughout the modules. This means the minimum required version of Node.js is now 8.0.0. To use with older versions of Node.js, we provide an ES5-compatible build. We've also added support for logging, which can be turned on with LOG=[debug|warn|error] environment variable.
v0.12.0
- IPFS pubsub