Arkhia now offers the Watchtower middleware solution that makes it easier for apps to access and work with the HCS.
Introduction
The Arkhia team continues to show its commitment streamlining developer workflows by introducing new tools and solutions for those working in the Hedera ecosystem. The last major release in December 2022 was WorkBench, which granted users the ability to see in granular detail how data from a call is formatted and parsed. Read about WorkBench on Arkhia’s Medium page.
January 2023 rings in not only the new year, but the next major release from Arkhia with the Watchtower tool. This is perhaps the most anticipated tool release from the team since Arkhia launched in public beta in September, 2022.
Read on to learn about how Watchtower is Arkhia’s solution to the streaming demands of the Hashgraph network.
What Watchtower Does
In short, Watchtower is a middleware tool that makes it easier for apps, especially client-side ones, to access and work with the Hedera Consensus Service (HCS), made accessible by the gRPC. With Watchtower, users can subscribe to HCS Topics easily through websockets and websocket libraries.
Builders on Arkhia, known as Arkhitects, remember that the HCS gRPC Relay is one of the options available to Arkhitects looking to query the Hedera network on Arkhia.
Watchtower provides a number of important features to developers which have been designed to reduce development times and increase the speed with which businesses can release new software. Watchtower authenticates streaming data and records streaming transactions while increasing security by preventing low-level access to the gRPC API.
It also translates HTTP2 to HTTP1, which makes data accessible through websockets so Arkhitects can subscribe to HCS through websockets. This is a particularly important feature of Watchtower because of the much greater prevalence of HTTP1 and websocket use across the industry.
Furthermore, Watchtower adds granular control over data that gets pushed to users. The tool allows Arkhitects to basically “listen” for particular sets of data as they stream down through the gRPC API rather than search for it on demand. With this functionality, Arkhitects can configure on-demand certain tags or keywords that a payload needs in order to cherry downstream the data that their application consumes.
The functionality of Watchtower will be augmented to be able to configure parsing rules to better manage the data flow down to the client. Additionally, Watchtower will add parsing rules in the future to better manage the data flow.
Conclusion
The Watchtower tool grants developers and applications a new, secure way to query and listen to the Hedera network.
At the time of launch, those signed up for Arkhia’s Growth Tier and above will have access to Watchtower. When other plans gain availability, the Arkhia team will send updates to Medium, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Make sure to follow Arkhia and sign up for email announcements to stay on top of the updates!
Sign up on Arkhia today and see how it can make your life easier at arkhia.io.
Arkhia is an enterprise-grade Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider for decentralised technologies. We are empowering organisations, teams, and individuals to build fast, modular, and scalable solutions in our high-availability environments for Web3 applications. Purposely built for reliability, resilience, and high throughput on a multi-chain network, the Arkhia API suite benefits anyone needing ultra-reliable network uptime for mission-critical applications. To learn more about how we provide enterprise-grade infrastructure, visit arkhia.io, subscribe to our newsletter, and follow us on Twitter (@arkhia_io), LinkedIn and Reddit.
