hyperledger
Caching/Processing known JSON-LD Contexts
On 18.4 W3C servers had a downtime which caused the credentials could not be issued. Specifically https://www.w3.org/2018/credentials/v1 and https://w3id.org/security/bbs/v1 could not be resolved.
Since the contexts do not change would It make sense to hardcode them?
Likely. This is one of the challenges of JSON-LD -- knowing how to handle contexts. AFAIK -- the recommendation is that code should NEVER dynamically load contexts, but should know about them. For something like ACA-Py, that means that the controller (the business component of an Aries Agent) should somehow be the source for dereferencing a JSON-LD context.
Any idea how that could work?
Admittedly, these two particular contexts could be pre-loaded by ACA-Py, since it does know about them. But the general problem is better handled with the controller handling the caching of contexts.
I agree. I think that offloading context caching to the controller will require quite a big effort, so hardcoding them could be a good part-time solution.
Agreed -- I think we should probably bundle the most commonly used context with ACA-Py.
In addition it may be easier to include a registry in ACA-Py of trusted contexts that can be configured add startup, possibly adding more through an endpoint later on.
Sounds good. That puts the responsibility on the controller to define the set of allowed contexts (startup, loaded via API), but ACA-Py does the loading when needed. I like that.
I suggest that an issue be created that defines what is needed, referencing this issue and with a help wanted label on it.
We talked about a similar point on the discord server ThreadId 1065643985646919740. I just want to document it here because it is very relevant. As swcurran said Loading context dynamically is not recommended. It is also harming the performance
For example, when I want to sign a Json-ld doc. AcaPy is sending many HTTP Request in the background ≈ 3 seconds
It would be great if these most used/known Json-ld contexts are cached or preloaded. But it will be also very very helpful to be able to import/cache/preload any other contexts
I took a quick look at Aries-framework-Go and they are solving it this way https://github.com/hyperledger/aries-framework-go/blob/main/docs/jsonld_context.md
