This PR significantly changes the APIs for instantiating Ethereum nodes in
a Go program. The new APIs are not backwards-compatible, but we feel that
this is made up for by the much simpler way of registering services on
node.Node. You can find more information and rationale in the design
document: https://gist.github.com/renaynay/5bec2de19fde66f4d04c535fd24f0775.
There is also a new feature in Node's Go API: it is now possible to
register arbitrary handlers on the user-facing HTTP server. In geth, this
facility is used to enable GraphQL.
There is a single minor change relevant for geth users in this PR: The
GraphQL API is no longer available separately from the JSON-RPC HTTP
server. If you want GraphQL, you need to enable it using the
./geth --http --graphql flag combination.
The --graphql.port and --graphql.addr flags are no longer available.
Rather than just closing the underlying network listener to stop our
HTTP servers, use the graceful shutdown procedure, waiting for any
in-process requests to finish.
This change makes it possible to run geth with JSON-RPC over HTTP and
WebSocket on the same TCP port. The default port for WebSocket
is still 8546.
geth --rpc --rpcport 8545 --ws --wsport 8545
This also removes a lot of deprecated API surface from package rpc.
The rpc package is now purely about serving JSON-RPC and no longer
provides a way to start an HTTP server.
rene
Steven E. Harris