Project Update

For the two of us here at A*, Gib is both a product and a research project. That is - as we research deeper into the Web Monetization specification, we discover new techniques and technologies that will help the product come to life. New lines of inquiry are also raised, through which we find new paths and opportunities.

Since our last blog post, we have crystallized the core implementation of Gib around the Payment Handler and Payment Method APIs. In order to reach our goal of providing a simple and elegant way for content producers to enable gift cards for their content, we must implement this subset of the Web Monetization specification. Let’s take a look at how things have moved in this direction.

Progress on Objectives

Overall, the Architecture and Design Phase has been extended as we have learned more about the tools available to us. Some items are due to be revised, but others have been affirmed as compatible with the Web Monetization specification:

Functional Specification

• We are updating our functional specification to reflect an architecture more attuned to the Payment Handler and Method APIs.

Dataflow Diagrams

• We have completed our Level 0 diagram, which encompasses a high-level overview of the capabilities for each Gib user type. We have also produced a series of Level 1 diagrams, which go into more detail about the processes that enable Gib to work as a system.

Design Specification

• We are discussing the relative merits of having Gib embodied in a browser extension, versus a web component. We have lowered the priority on this decision in order to focus on implementing the Payment Handler and Method APIs.

We have also enabled monetization on our homepage at astar.app!

Key Activities

The last A&D phase task that we must tackle is updating the Functional and Design Specifications to account for implementation of the Payment Handler and Method APIs.

After that, we will begin implementing and testing the Gib Payment Handler and Gib Payment Method interfaces.

Communications and Marketing

We are committed to maintaining a transparent design and implementation process for Gib. These blog posts are one way to achieve that. Further, we have published our specification documents, product thinking materials, and dataflow diagrams to Gib’s GitHub repo; and will continue to do so with our materials as they are developed.

It is our hope that this documentation will allow other Web Monetization developers to understand the principles and methods that comprise Gib. Once we have finalized the publication, we will invite other developers to view and comment, which will help us establish an open-source community around the software.

What’s Next?

We have caught strong tailwinds from our research into the Web Monetization specification, and look forward to having much of our implementation of the Gib Payment Handler and Gib Payment Method completed and shareable in our next blog post.

What Community Support Would Benefit Gib?

We would love to hear from developers who have experience implementing W3C specifications (and especially testing against their provided suites). If you have such experience, please feel free to reach out to us at dev@astar.app.