The Anselus project has a series of milestones to help gauge progress. Having these milestones is critical because there isn’t anything to see, to download, or to try out. It’s understandable at this stage, but it’s still disappointing. Earlier this week we reached a major milestone: demo completeness for the server side of Identity Services and the pyanselus Python client library.
What is demo completeness? Simply put, demo completeness means that a part of the project has reached a point where it would be possible to build a demo on top of it. Right now, it is possible to write a demo in Python which interacts with the server. What would it look like? Not much, unfortunately.
Identity Services is the foundation layer for the Anselus platform. Everything else has to build on top of what it provides. It covers account creation, logging in, adding new devices, password resets, and key exchange. A demo of this would pretty much look like someone creating an account and logging in. From a regular user’s point of view, it’s as boring as it can get. Everything that’s happening is on the other side of the curtain, so nothing to show anyone just yet.
Where to next?
So what’s next? The transport layer. Once again, this is mostly server-side code, but the difference is that as it develops, it will be possible to build a demo that actually does something useful. The transport layer sits on top of Identity Services and moves user data around. This means data synchronization and message delivery.
The design documents still needs work. Back in November, it was clear that the specifications in their current state needed some changes. Markdown was dropped in favor of Asciidoc, a text markup format which is better suited to formal documentation. While they were being converted, they were temporarily dropped from the website and moved to their own repository on GitHub. You can view the Anselus design documents at any time just by clicking on one of the files in the list. Periodic releases of these documents will soon be available for download and review from this website.
All in all, there are a lot of exciting things happening. Here’s to looking forward to seeing what 2021 brings!