Polkadart proposal

[Lohann]

Project Abstract

Polkadart is a Dart library that provides a clean wrapper around all the methods exposed by a Polkadot/Substrate network client and defines all the types exposed by a node. It's an equivalent to polkadot-api written in Dart language.

For which grant level are you applying?

• Level 1: Up to $10,000, 2 approvals
• Level 2: Up to $30,000, 3 approvals
• Level 3: Unlimited, 5 approvals (for > $100k Web3 Foundation Council approval)

Application Checklist

• The application template has been copied, renamed ( project_name.md) and updated.
• I have read and understood the FAQs, application guidelines and announcement guidelines.
• A BTC, Ethereum (USDT/USDC/DAI) or Polkadot/Kusama (aUSD) address for the payment of the milestones is provided inside the application.
• I have read and acknowledge the terms and conditions.
• The software delivered for this grant will be released under an open-source license specified in the application.
• The initial PR contains only one commit (squash and force-push if needed).
• The grant will only be announced once the first milestone has been accepted.
• I prefer the discussion of this application to be in a private Element/Matrix channel. My username is: @lohann:matrix.org

How Did You Hear About our grants program?

• Social Media
• Hackathon
• Personal Recommendation
• Substrate Builders Program
• Investor/VC
• Online Search
• Other: _______

[CLAassistant]

All committers have signed the CLA.

[semuelle]

Discussion here.

[Noc2]

Just a reminder here to sign the CLA Bot, which means our terms and conditions. For everything else I will join the private channel.

[ashlink11]

I'm extremely excited about this. I think it has the potential to bring lots of high quality front-end devs to the substrate ecosystem, and I see you have a huge incentive to maintain the api given your Rankanizer project. I'm a huge fan of Flutter although I haven't used it personally. From what I know, it seems to be the leading cross-platform app framework (preferred over React Native (I don't think Facebook even uses React Native much, if at all, despite developing it)). Also Flutter seems to be a great framework to aid with building components and layout that meet many of the ideals of a Progressive Web App (PWA), which is admittedly very difficult to achieve, especially for single-person and small front-end developer teams. I will share this with the grants committee!

[ashlink11]

Please note: the discussion was formerly private (so see Element for chat history) but I've just removed the private discussion label per request of the team to bring the discussion to the public forum. Cheers!

[alxs]

Hey @leonardocustodio @Lohann, are you aware of https://github.com/Pocket4D/Polkadot-Dart? It seems to be unmaintained, but you may be able to reuse a lot of code from there.

[ashlink11]

Hey @leonardocustodio @Lohann, are you aware of https://github.com/Pocket4D/Polkadot-Dart? It seems to be unmaintained, but you may be able to reuse a lot of code from there.

Hey @alxs, thanks for mentioning. The Polkadart team already mentioned in their application (Ecosystem Fit section) essentially what you've said that it's unmaintained but they're aware of it. :)

[alxs]

Thanks @cruikshankss. In that case, are you planning to reuse their code @leonardocustodio @Lohann? The grant seems quite expensive considering you could just update the Polkadot-Dart project. If you're not planning on using their work, could you explain why and expand on the differences between the two projects? Also, I just changed the grant level in your first comment, since this is a level 3 grant as you state in the application.

[leonardocustodio]

Hello @alxs ,
We are not planning to reuse any of their code. Even if we did I don't think that would be a simple and cheap task. There are multiple reasons for that, here is their repo: https://github.com/Pocket4D/Polkadot-Dart

1. They only finished milestone 1, most of the work they have put on milestone 2.
2. The project was made using flutter 1.x, we are currently on version 3.x. On flutter 1.x not even null safety was supported.
3. At the time they made the project substrate used metadata v12 that needs typegen/interface files. Today substrate uses metadata v14 with auto-generated types by parsing the metadata itself and not the type/interface files. And that is a good amount of work.
4. They use dynamic generated libs, we will try to avoid this because that requires rust and compiling for each platform and generates way extra work for developers that do not have much experience.

[alxs]

Thanks for the details. Makes sense and in that case, I'm happy to support your application.

[Noc2]

I'm happy to support it as well.

[takahser]

This would be very useful to the ever-growing Flutter community. I'm happy to approve as well. 👍

[github-actions]

Congratulations and welcome to the Web3 Foundation Grants Program! Please refer to our Milestone Delivery repository for instructions on how to submit milestones and invoices, our FAQ for frequently asked questions and the support section of our README for more ways to find answers to your questions.

Before you start, take a moment to read through our announcement guidelines for all communications related to the grant or make them known to the right person in your organisation. In particular, please don't announce the grant publicly before at least the first milestone of your project has been approved. At that point or shortly before, you can get in touch with us at grantsPR@web3.foundation and we'll be happy to collaborate on an announcement about the work you’re doing.

Lastly, please remember to let us know in case you run into any delays or deviate from the deliverables in your application. You can either leave a comment here or directly request to amend your application via PR. We wish you luck with your project! 🚀

[keeganquigley]

Hi @leonardocustodio @Lohann how is milestone 2 coming along?

[leonardocustodio]

Hey @keeganquigley, it is almost over. I know we are a little bit behind the schedule for this milestone, but there is only a single topic missing right now, all the rest is done. I believe if not next week at most in the other we will be submitting the delivery.

[Lohann]

@keeganquigley sorry for the delay, the milestone 2 has been delivered here:
w3f/Grant-Milestone-Delivery#799

[keeganquigley]

@Lohann are you still making good progress on M3?

[leonardocustodio]

Hello @keeganquigley , we are very late for M3 unfortunately. But we won't give up ;)

[keeganquigley]

Thanks for the update @Lohann it's generally not an issue to be behind, we just ask that you submit an amendment to extend the timeline if it will be significantly delayed. Thanks!

[keeganquigley]

pinging @leonardocustodio @Lohann

[leonardocustodio]

Hello @keeganquigley , we are still working on it, you can see some updates in the repository. We will send an amendment today.

[Lohann]

@keeganquigley sorry for the late reply, the scope for signed extrinsic has increased significantly, a lot of cryptographic tools required for support this functionality doesn't exists in Dart. I'll submit an amend increasing the timeline and with detailed info about the new scope.

[keeganquigley]

Hi @Lohann I see the amendment PR was rejected due to inactivity. Let us know if we should re-open it. Otherwise we will likely cancel the grant in the coming days.

[leonardocustodio]

Hello @keeganquigley, I can't talk for Lohann but I can take over the project if you guys agree with. Though I would remove the sr25519 part for now as I would not be able to complete that anytime soon. And obviously with that make a few adjustments in the amendment.

[keeganquigley]

Thanks @leonardocustodio does this mean you will file an amendment PR yourself to mark this change and extend the timeline? That should work if @Lohann can confirm the change here for transparency.

[leonardocustodio]

Yes, if everybody agrees obviously.

[Lohann]

@keeganquigley
Hello, I apologize to everyone, unfortunately I haven't been able to dedicate as much time as I would like on this last milestone. We had 5 engineers working on this project, but implementing Signed Extrinsics requires a deep understanding of Substrate codebase and Rust, while working on it I even found a bug on keyring/substrate substrate-bip39, and currently only @leonardocustodio and I have the necessary knowledge and experience to implement this last milestone, which slowdown the development a bit.

I confirm @leonardocustodio as the new owner of Polkadart and this Grant, he is actively using polkadart in production and have the necessary knowledge to complete this last milestone, which is by far the most complex one. Besides that I'll continue as a contributor.

[keeganquigley]

Thanks for the update @Lohann sounds good. @leonardocustodio feel free to amend the original application to create an amendment PR. Feel free to ping me when I should take a look!

[leonardocustodio]

Okay, I will make the amendment PR, thank you @keeganquigley