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Open-sourcing Polkascan block-explorer stack
4 years ago
This treasury proposal contains the remaining activities to open-source the new Polkascan explorer stack, which is an integral part of our Business Plan (page 22) to provide a full-stack open-source block explorer for the Dotsama community
Comments (2)
As far as I understand, the current situation in the ecosystem is that there are a lot of explorers out there and many of them out-compete Polkascan in terms of usability and functionality while Polkascan has mostly stalled in development and improvements. Consequently, my main concern is whether this proposal improves the existing block explorer usability for a regular user. From my current knowledge, I think the least thing we can do is to ask the team to polish the proposal more and add accountability, maybe get more details about features, payment terms, deliverables, future plans and timing of explorer being fully operational.
@hatem thanks for your feedback and to address the concerns you might have:
As far as I know of, there is currently no full-stack open-source block explorer available for Substrate based networks, especially in Python. So although other block-explorers might out-compete Polkascan in terms of features, it still has a lot of relevance in order to let other team build and host their own explorer for their own Substrate-based chain under an open-source license.
The target audience is not really the regular end-user, but for example parachain teams that want an open-source alternate to the current hosted proprietary block-explorers, to validate the correctness, host their own block-explorer, add other features etc.
This proposal is in my opinion very clear and detailed, some components of the stack are already open-source and available, the harvester -which is actually already developed and running- not yet. So we will open-source that and all activities are already specified in more details in the linked proposal, with the addition of an extension framework to use the harvested data for other applications as well (like the Calendar we are working on) and other activities mentioned in the proposal.
With that harvester repository as final piece of the puzzle anyone can run what is available at https://explorer.polkascan.io and parachain teams can host, develop and extend it to their liking under a GPLv3 license.