Stellar Bridge Server, SDK redundancy?

dmichael

Hi.

I am working with the bridge server (https://github.com/stellar/bridge-server) and noticed that it exposes a few endpoints that perform the same functions as the SDK, but over HTTP with no real security (API token and VPC are suggested). The receive callback is nice for monitoring network payments, but other than that, is this server really required to be an "anchor"?

For the /builder endpoint in particular, the JSON input object is unwieldy and the bridge server does not even submit the resulting "enveloped" to Horizon - you still have to do that in code. So it seems that creating transactions and sending them to a Horizon server is actually simpler using the Node or Go SDK than constructing a huge JSON object and submitting it to this bridge server.

Can someone at Stellar please help me understand the use cases of the bridge server vs the SDK?

Thanks!

umbrel

I'm not an expert on the topic, but bridge server is definitely not a requirement to be an anchor, it's just a useful (for some institutions) tool to start with Stellar network.
Initially it played important role filling vacuum of missing client implementations in different programming languages. Maybe exchanges use it to easily integrate Stellar into their infrastructure, it is something standalone they can set up and use without deeply integrating Stellar into their platform.
I personally wanted to use it first time I started developing something for Stellar, but quickly realized that it doesn't do what I need, it can only listen to 1 account, so I moved on to development using SDK.

justrossthings

Had the exact same thoughts working on a project now. Will try to avoid the bridge server if I can