Challenges and Improvement Suggestions for Node API from an Ecosystem User

[jcstein]

✍️ Summary

Ecosystem teams have reported challenges regarding the use of the celestia-node API for transaction submission. The difficulties largely revolve around two factors:

1. The transaction submission methods are synchronous, leading to the code hanging while waiting for a response, which can sometimes take a considerable amount of time. This results in inefficient use of resources and can lead to suboptimal user experience.
2. The current API setup prevents more than one transaction from a single account to a given namespace within one block due to the manner in which cosmos-sdk/tendermint manages nonces. Although the team facing this issue has overcome similar hurdles with other software, such as Metro, they note the issue here.

The teams suggest that a shift to a REST API could prove more beneficial and user-friendly. They argue that developers are generally more familiar and comfortable with REST APIs over RPC APIs, as the former typically offer better tooling and efficiency.

Their feedback further indicates that the current API setup may impose a considerable engineering burden on external teams, potentially deterring them from adopting new releases.

📄 Relevant Issues

The teams have also identified a few open issues on GitHub that are relevant to this topic:

• Issue #122
• Issue #1885

☀️ Proposed Next Steps

I am proposing the following actions to assess and improve the situation:

1. Seek feedback from key ecosystem users to understand the long-term implications of the default use of JSON RPC before it becomes an embedded problem.
2. Default to a REST API, given its generally more popular preference among developers.
3. Adopt Google’s API standards: https://google.aip.dev/
4. Consider the use of gRPC with a REST proxy.

This GitHub discussion aims to tackle the nuances and comparisons between REST and JSON-RPC, providing an open forum for community users to discuss and share their insights on the API's current state and potential improvements.