CAPI: The Computable API

We’ve covered the core Computable contracts at some depth in the last few chapters. However, we haven’t said too much detail about the actual datatrust softare. We’ll remedy that in this chapter.

Let’s start from first principles. A Datatrust is a system that is responsible for storing data off-chain. As we dicussed in the listings chapter, a listing is uniquely identified by its listingHash. It makes sense that the datatrust should key its listing data by listingHash. This suggests that the core of a Datatrust is an off-chain key-value store that maps the listingHash for a listing to the actual listing data. Different implementations of a Datatrust can choose to use different software backends to implement this key-value store functionality.

We’ve mentioned briefly that the datatrust is a key-value store that holds data off-chain. What else is a datatrust responsible for doing? We saw a few of these responsibilities in the datatrust contract chapter, but what else does a datatrust have to do? Or put more generally, when is some piece of software a datatrust? In particular what are the external signals and messages that a datatrust must respond to?

The brief answer to these questions is that a datatrust is any piece of software which implements CAPI (the Computable API). Briefly, CAPI is a set of endpoints with associated functionality that must be implemented by a datatrust. In the remainder of this chapter, we’ll discuss the endpoints that a datatrust must implement to be compliant with CAPI

Listings Endpoint

/listings

Candidates Endpoint

/candidates

TODO: Add more detail on CAPI as it’s fleshed out.

Last Thoughts

In this chapter, we covered CAPI, the protocol which governs the off-chain datatrust software. In the next chapter, you’ll learn more about the API libraries that permit developers to talk to the on-chain smart contracts. In particular, we’ll discuss computable.py and computable.js, the developer libraries we’ve built to facilitate interactions with on-chain smart contracts.