Show HN: A Living Ledger – Visualization of the Ripple Network in Real-Time

Re:Show HN: A Living Ledger – Visualization of the Ripple Ne... by free-trampolin on Saturday March 17, 2018 @04:16PM (#16608847)

Creator here. I created this app to visualize what is going on on the Ripple Network (kind of a blockchain, called 'ledger') in real-time. The application is written in Elixir/JavaScript, the client uses SVG (d3.js) and mostly css-transitions for visualization. Data is fetched from a public ripple validator using web-sockets, pre-processed server-side and finally broadcasted to the clients.

What you see, are validated transactions (TXs) between addresses. A TX always contains at least one address but can contain multiple (e.g. payment targets, but many more). These TX are not necessarily connected the XRP crypto-asset. The Ripple Network can be used without an asset as a messaging platform.

Check it out and enjoy. You can btw click on nodes to explore them. If you have any feedback or suggestions feel free to comment!

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Re:Show HN: A Living Ledger – Visualization of the Ripple Ne... by nowarninglabel on Saturday March 17, 2018 @06:44PM (#16609439)

Neat. What were some reasons why you chose Elixir to write it in?

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Re:Show HN: A Living Ledger – Visualization of the Ripple Ne... by free-trampolin on Saturday March 17, 2018 @06:53PM (#16609467)

Thank you very much. The first reason is that I program exclusively using functional programming. That said, the choice is somehow limited. I have very good experiences with Elixir. Statelessly streaming uncritical data to a client is a perfect fit for Erlang's/Elixir's "let-it-fail"-paradigm. If the web-socket crashes server-side just let the supervisor respawn it one-for-one, there is no permanent state. I hope that makes sense.

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