TSG Control Plane
The TSG Control Plane is the TNO implementation of the Dataspace Protocol. It handles cataloging, contract negotiation and transfer process management. Furthermore, there a registry/service catalogue component within the TSG Control Plane.
Structure
- Architecture
- Configuration
- Build process
- Interoperability
Design choices
1. Leveraging existing standards
Used standards:
- Dataspace Protocol 2024-1
2. Programming language & environment
NodeJS & Typescript are chosen as execution and development environment for these reasons:
- Efficiently deployable in cloud environments; considerably lower memory requirements compared to JVM-based environments
- Strongly typed development; given the size of the projects a strongly typed programming language is a must for maintainability of the code
- Easily understandable for new developers; Javascript/Typescript are more easily picked up by developers then for example Rust or Go
- Ability to share code/models between frontend and backend; since frontend UIs are predominantly written in Javascript/Typescript allows to share interface/classes between frontend and backend, reducing errors
3. Limit external dependencies
The requirement on external dependencies should be as low as possible, including only dependencies in case they provide concrete benefits. Reason for this is to keep the Software Bill of Materials as light as possible to recude security risks of these dependencies. This also applies for dependencies of external services, in particular for authentication towards the wallet where oAuth2.0 could be an alternative to the internal authentication as used right now. The advantage of the internal authentication is that it doesn't require any external service, especially given that Keycloak (one of the most used self-hosted authentication services) is based on a JVM and uses considerably amounts of memory.
The main dependencies of the backend are: