Nostr relay

Do not index

This is my journey of building a Nostr relays service in the cloud

So, first of all, there are a lot of relays on the market. Why do I want to create a new one?

I aim to create a new Java relay and a platform to create private/paid relays stored in the cloud (AWS).

I intend to create my own to experiment with the Nostr protocol end to end. I have already started implementing a Nostr client, nostrsky.com, and a relay is what I need to understand the Nostr protocol end to end.

Another reason is the fact that there are not so many Java implementations. People think that Java is old and not good for Nostr? But I believe that Java is keeping pace with the other languages.

And there is another personal reason. I want to keep pace with modern Java. All these are fresh in 2023: Spring 6, SpringBoot 3, and Java JDK 20, Jakarta EE 10.

My inspiration for the technologies I want to use is in this presentation:

Keynote: Introducing Spring Framework 6

The Spring team has been preparing a new generation of the core framework for 2023 and beyond: Spring Framework 6 comes with a Java 17 and Jakarta EE 9 baseline and introduces first-class support for AOT processing and native executables, as well as early support for virtual threads ("Project Loom"). This talk focuses on key design decisions and upgrade considerations, summarizes the feature set of the Spring Framework 6.0 release, and presents an early roadmap towards 6.1. #SpringOneTour2022 #springframework #springboot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mitWK_DwKGs

The Nostr relays on the market.

Here are some statistics about the existing Nostr relays:

Nostr Stats

https://stats.nostr.band/

Here is a good description of the relay's relevance on the market:

Tips for relays \ stacker news ~bitcoin

“Tips for Relays. Forget about having a thousand and one relays. The first option is to pay for nostr.wine, it allows you to use the filter.nostr.wine filter. The filter works both requesting events from other relays and sending events to other relays. In case you want to send events to other relays you have to add the relay with the following syntax: wss://filter.nostr.wine/REPLACEWITHYOUR_NPUB?broadcast=true Reading list: wss://relay.damus.io wss://nos.lol wss://relay.current.fyi wss://brb.io wss://nostr.oxtr.dev wss://relay.nostr.bg wss://no.str.cr wss://nostr.mom wss://nostr.zebedee.cloud wss://relay.plebstr.com wss://offchain.pub Writing list: wss://relay.damus.io wss://nos.lol wss://relay.snort.social wss://nostr.oxtr.dev wss://relay.nostr.bg wss://nostr.fmt.wiz.biz wss://nostr.mom wss://nostr.zebedee.cloud wss://no.str.cr wss://relay.plebstr.com wss://offchain.pub The next special relay is relay.nostr.band. This relay reads events from all relays and applies a spam filter, in the case of writing you only write to relay.nostr.band but it is a good complement to add content to relay filter.nostr.wine as it only requests events from your contacts and your contacts' contacts. It is not clear to me from which relay is requesting the events as the code is not available. And finally the relay nostr.mutinywallet.com. This relay uses blastr which is a nostr cloudfare worker proxy that publishes to all known relays. Basically what it does is to read the list of online relays from nostr.watch and all events are queued to be executed in batches by another worker that rotates every 30s if there is an event queued, or once a certain amount of events are queued. In this case the relay is write-only. In short, your relays could be reduced to 4: wss://nostr.wine wss://filter.nostr.wine/REPLACEWITHYOUR_NPUB?broadcast=true wss://relay.nostr.band wss://nostr.mutinywallet.com With them you save bandwidth and battery, actually filter.nostr.wine in write mode and nostr.mutinywallet are redundant, but I put the two because nostr.mutinywallet.com has more amplitude because it publishes in all the online relays of nostr.watch and also because it has high availability in case of failure of any of the two relays mentioned above. The same case is applicable in the case of reading for filter.nostr.wine and relay.nostr.band.” Source: note1ukmaarf2t9dkhxkphwh4sv4qsrtnvxwz09wmfpgsujwh3m48h8gstyef2f [7 comments]

$Tips for relays \ stacker news ~bitcoin$

https://stacker.news/items/147056

$Tips for relays \ stacker news ~bitcoin$

What is a Nostr relay?

By definition, a relay stores Nostr events sent by clients and accept subscriptions from clients. Events are like this (in this case, we have an event of type 0 → meta-data):

It can filter and offer search for events: profiles, notes, etc. Also can offer anti-spam support.

The relays can be paid at https://relay.exchange or not. A list of worldwide relays is here: https://nostr.watch/relays/find

nostr.watch

https://nostr.watch/relays/find

Relays browsers:

Nostr-browser

https://browser.nostr.band/

A nostr Relay explorer

Browse nostr relays

https://nostrrr.com/

Starting the project

I decided to use SpringBoot 3 (Spring Framework 6) and Java JDK 20 to build the relays service. See this URL: https://spring.io

Some reasons:

support for Graal VM (native - improve startup time and lower usage of memory)

ready for virtual threads (Loom project - improvements of runtime speed)

There is a very convenient way to start a project with Sprin Boot, but I can’t use it now:

JHipster - https://www.jhipster.tech

It has scaffolding for the UI
but is not migrated to the new SpringBoot 3 / Spring 6

The Golden Path to SpringOne: Reactive Microservices with Spring Boot and JHipster with Matt Raible

https://tanzu.vmware.com/developer/tv/golden-path/9/ Microservice architectures are all the rage in JavaLand. They allow teams to develop services independently and deploy autonomously. Why microservices? IF you’re developing a large/complex application AND you need to deliver it rapidly, frequently, and reliably over a long period of time THEN the Microservice architecture is often a good choice. Reactive architectures are becoming increasingly popular for organizations that need to do more with less hardware. Reactive programming allows you to build systems that are resilient to high load. In this session, I’ll show you how to use JHipster to create a reactive microservices architecture with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Keycloak, and run it all in Docker. You’ll leave with the know-how to create your own resilient apps!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq31RuT4Bxw

The lite version of JHipster is a good candidate because it already has the new Spring 6 / SpringBoot 3

JHipster Lite - https://www.jhipster.tech/jhipster-lite

clean architecture, incremental development

What is JHipster Lite and why should you care? by Julien Dubois

In this talk, Pim will explain how to set goals for learning, how to identify which goals could help your team and what concrete actions you could take to help you or your team achieve these goals. You will leave this talk with a good understanding of Bloom’s taxonomy for cognitive learning goals and ideas how to apply them in your daily environment. JULIEN DUBOIS Julien Dubois manages the Java and JavaScript developer advocacy teams at Microsoft. He is known as the creator and lead developer of the JHipster project, and as a Java Champion. In the past 20 years, Julien mainly worked with the Java and Spring technologies, leading technical teams for many different customers across all industries. As he loves sharing his passion, Julien wrote a book on the Spring Framework, spoke at more than 200 international conferences, and created several popular Open Source projects. ------------------------------------------------------------ INTRO * visuals & editing by @Mercator * music : Avocado by Ephixa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnLGnY-vzLI

Playing with existing Java libraries for Nostr

So, I search the entire github.com, and I get just one Java library for working with Nostr protocol, and I don’t like it very much. Github: I https://github.com/tcheeric/nostr-java

it uses lombock which has no future after Java introduced records (I used lombok in the past, but now it is obsolete)

too much inheritance in the domain model (this is a sin of the academic world - in real projects, the composition is preferred)

the way the project is structured, the maven sub-project is also not the best (it is better to be structured on NIPs)

in-house JSON encoder/decoder is needed?

I started to browse fiatjaf repositories on github.com. Maybe I can find something better:

fiatjaf - Repositories

vocês não têm nível. fiatjaf has 382 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

https://github.com/fiatjaf?tab=repositories

If not, I will use this library and try to create a better one afterward.

Bootstrapping the project

I initiated the project using Spring Initializr with some libraries: web sockets, persistence, and others.

start.spring.io

https://start.spring.io/

I initialized a similar project but with JHipster Lite.

JHipster Lite

https://lite.jhipster.tech/landscape

I have to decide which of them to use to bootstrap my project!

A few days later….

I decided to use JHipster Lite because:

it has already Spring Boot inside 🦾

it has already UI (Angular) support

extra utilities

But, I will use Clean Architecture and not Hexagonal Architecture. They are similar as the final goal, but I like Uncle Bob's approach more.

And see here the trends:

I’m inspired by the following:

Anatomy of a Spring Boot App with Clean Architecture - Spring I/O 2023

Anatomy of a Spring Boot App with Clean Architecture Steve Pember Senior Staff @ Stavvy, Inc Spring I/O 2023 @svpember @svpember Some Light Pandemic Reading...

https://www.slideshare.net/StevePember/anatomy-of-a-spring-boot-app-with-clean-architecture-spring-io-2023

NEXT STEPS

implement a first version of a relay server

create a new feature in JHipster around the Nostr events (JHipster is generating just a dummy feature as a simple business example)
save the events in different data sources: Postgres, Firebase, etc
expose a relay on a web socket: https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/reference/web/websocket/server.html
play with Nostr Java: https://github.com/tcheeric/nostr-java
test the relay with integration tests