Visualising the network

[a-shine]

An interesting feature of the library/platform might be the ability to visualise the network i.e. each known host (removed duplicates) would be a vertex and the list of known hosts per node would determine the directed edge. This may be a useful tool to help reason about the network's behaviour.

This network visualisation could be attained by having a crawler node, that crawls its way across the network recording all the known hosts in a hashmap where the key is the IP of the host and the value is a list of known hosts of that particular host. This could be used to plot a vertex edge graph.

Have a server/REST API (this would not make the network centralised in any way but would just be a fun addition and debugging tool to visualise the network) where every time a node gets started it attempts (doesn't matter if it doesn't) to send a message to that server and record its existence in a database. It could then send all sorts of metadata to that server to visualise the network i.e. known hosts as edges, pulsating if broadcasting - visualise namespace and subnetworks... Would be really fun