[SEP-48] Contract Interface Spec

[leighmcculloch]

I've opened a pull request containing a SEP that captures the existing contract interface (contract spec) capabilities that exist in the Rust soroban-sdk, the stellar-cli, and in many other tools as a result of them consuming the spec XDR:

• SEP-48: Contract Interface Specification #1691

This SEP is intended to be a living document, a specification, and to evolve with the contract spec as it evolves, unless of course a proposal to modify it makes such significant changes that amount to a different proposal.

All and any feedback appreciated. Because this SEP captures existing and already adopted behaviour the most useful feedback at this moment is whether the document captures it accurately, and in a way that is easily digestible and replicable in new SDKs or new tooling that needs to decode it. Making the document more digestible might mean removing information, adding information, or changing how we present information.

[sreuland]

The scope of contract interface definition proposed in SEP-48, #1691 is focused on how to define the specs for public methods of the contract wasm. It doesn't explore definition of events emitted by the contract. Should the SEP-48 proposal also capture contact event meta definitions? The events compose significant external facing contract behavior and as such SEP-48 seems like ideal place.

contract event definitions have been explored in some tangent discussions:

• soroban-sdk request - Include events in contract interfaces / spec rs-soroban-sdk#1097
• app protocol catalog - Contract code entry provides catalog of app protocols and events supported #1596 (reply in thread)
• defi protocol - https://discord.com/channels/897514728459468821/1218959023047704640/1219282712733421689

For external systems that want to interact with a contract's events, it appears like they will currently leverage SEP-47 to identify the sep protocols supported and then refer out-of-band to the associated stellar-protocol/ecosystem SEP to understand how to develop code that can parse the events, topics, and payload schemas.

If event meta specs are co-located in wasm of contract it an provide more options for external systems to automate parsing event streams reliably at development or potentially at runtime.

Coincidentally, establishing a standard to define event specs in wasm would provide a way for contracts to declare non-sep event behavior also.

[leighmcculloch]

If event meta specs are co-located in wasm of contract it an provide more options for external systems to automate parsing event streams reliably at development or potentially at runtime.

+1 I'm currently prototyping a proposal to do that, add events to SEP-48.

I'm using the issue you linked to to track that work:

• Include events in contract interfaces / spec rs-soroban-sdk#1097

We can use this thread to track it now more broadly independent of the SDK specific work.