Release notes

The first release of bee lays the foundation for the Swarm network, aimed at offering storage and communication infrastructure for a self-sovereign digital society. The bee client implements a node in the Swarm and will allow operators to collectively implement a Distributed Immutable Store of Chunks (DISC), described in chapter 2 of the Book of Swarm (swarm-gateways.net/bzz:/latest.bookofswarm.eth/).

To that end, we have implemented:

• Discovery and topology: upon startup, you bee node will connect with other nodes, to form an overlay network with Kademlia topology.
• Retrieval: when you download from Swarm, you retrieve chunks from the network using forwarding Kademlia routing with response backwarding to locate chunks and to deliver them.
• Push sync: When you upload to Swarm, chunks are pushed immediately to the place in the network where they belong. This process is similar to the inverse process of retrieval.
• Pull sync: this protocol helps nodes to sync on chunks in order to replicate chunks in a local ndeighbourhood. It ensures that chunks stay in the place where they belong according to the network topology even in the face of nodes continuously leaving and joining the network.

On top of the DISC, we added a simplistic chunker and joiner, allowing you to upload and download files.

The focus has been on correct design and simplicity. Performance optimizations and non-essential features are left out deliberately.

You can interact with the bee node via HTTP API, which offers endpoints to upload and download chunks and inspect the state of the node. Further documentation is found at swarm-gateways.net/bzz:/docs.swarm.eth/