@ethersphere/bee-js v2.0.0

This is our first major version bump as we did a big revamp of bee-js internals and fixed a few things and shortcomings that required breaking changes.

🤖 HTTP client swap (timeout and retries support)

In the JS browser ecosystem, there are two main HTTP clients: old XMLHttpRequest (XHR) API and new modern fetch API.

We originally used axios library that employs the XHR client, but XHR is old and will not get any new features as it is superseded with fetch API that is actively developed by the WHATWG group, and hence it has its limitations. Many limitations can be overcome using polyfills etc. but a hard stop is networking that only browsers decide what to allow (usually based on the specification). In the case of XHR the limitation is streaming support.

We have therefore decided to use fetch based library ky that supports streaming downloads and hopefully in close future will support also streaming uploads (see whatwg/fetch#966, there is also already functional experiment that enables this in Chrome). fetch is also more future-proof.

This change, unfortunately, does not come without a cost and that is support for tracking upload progress, that fetch still does not have (if interested please comment on the relevant whatwg/fetch#607 issue to raise importance).
If this feature is crucial for you, we have devised a workaround thanks to @mattiaz9, which is demonstrated in our example upload-progress.

This change unfortunately is breaking as we originally exposed AxiosOptions on our API. We have refactored this into more generic HTTP options that should be more future-proof. Thanks to ky we also now have support for retries of failed requests (only for non-POST requests, defaults are seen here) and timeouts. Both are possible to set generally for the Bee instance and/or override it for each method call.

🎏 Streaming revamp

As part of the HTTP client revamp, we had a deeper look at how we handle streams. In the JS land, there are two main types of streams the NodeJS Readable and the browser WHATWG ReadableStream. As our design mindset is browser-first and polyfill the rest in NodeJs, we have unified all returned streams into the WHATWG ReadableStream no matter what platform you are on. Most probably you will want to use NodeJs Readable on NodeJs platform, so we have included utility function readableWebToNode that converts WHATWG stream into NodeJs. There are also more stream-related utility functions that you can check out.

For stream inputs, we accept both types of streams and convert them internally.

⏎ Upload results refactor

One of our short-coming was dropping the returned object from upload methods in favor of the simple string Reference. Later on, we discovered that there is actually a need to return more information from upload operations because Bee automatically creates a Tag for each upload that we could return. Hence we have introduced back UploadResult interface that all the upload methods will now return.

🫓 Utility namespace flatting and filtering

We have merged all the Utils.* namespaces directly into Utils and we have filtered out the functions only to those that make sense to expose in order to minimize the public API and possible future breaking changes.

🗾 uploadCollection() method

We have introduced new uploadCollection method that is more flexible in uploading collection if you do not want to use our convenience methods like uploadFilesFromDirectory() or uploadFiles. This new method accepts the Collection<Uint8Array | Readable> interface.

⚠ BREAKING CHANGES

• Requests made by bee-js are now reported with User-Agent: bee-js/<<bee-js's version>> (#390)
• Utils.setDefaultHeaders() was removed in favor of Bee/BeeDebug instance's option defaultHeaders (#390)
• Hooks (#390)
  • Utils.hooks.* was removed in favor of Bee/BeeDebug instance's options onRequest and onResponse
  • Hooks now pass only metadata of the requests and not the payload
• All returned streams are now of WHATWG ReadableStream. If you need NodeJS's Readable you can use Utils.readableWebToNode() utility function. (#390)
• All axiosOptions were removed from those methods that supported it (for example bee.downloadReadableData(), bee.reuploadPinnedData(), UploadOptions does not have axiosOptions property anymore) (#390)
• Unfortunately fetch does not support tracking of upload progress (like XHR/axios supported with the onUploadProgress). Please see our example upload-progress for work-around. (#390)
• All upload methods now returns UploadResult interface (#408)
• bee.pssSend() now throws error if the specified target exceeds maximal value. Use Utils.makeMaxTarget() that will give you the max target that Bee accepts. (#384)
• Utils namespace is flattened and limited on the functions (#395)

Other changes:

• All upload methods that used to accept NodeJS's Readable now accept both NodeJS and WHATWG Readable(Stream).
• Usage of ReadableStreams in a browser is now possible. Be aware that real support for streaming browsers has only for download, but not upload. When Readable is passed to upload methods it is first fully buffered before making the request.

Features

• HTTP request options is possible to override per method call (#411) (9eac5cd)
• return UploadResult for upload methods (#408) (e58b8e8)

Bug Fixes

• pss target length verification (#384) (fd032a8)
• remove check for pinned content in reupload (#412) (6032a22) - thanks @ldeffenb for reporting this!

Code Refactoring

• ky replaces axios (#390) (5f08d1e)
• utility module flatting and limiting (#395) (ee68ed2)