GUI/TUI for Portal Network

[acolytec3]

Ultralight used to have a browser client built in react that allowed a relatively decent graphical UI to interact with the portal network. We also exposed the portalnetwork base portal API in the developer console so users could always interact directly with the API if the browser client's UI had gaps one wanted to experiment with.

As such, I think it's time to start talking about bringing back a GUI/TUI interface for Ultralight and not just the rpc exposed by the cli package.

I have two ideas about potential ways forward:

• A TUI/REPL inspired by this PR to ethereumjs. I think it could be cool to implement a REPL that wraps portalnetwork and allows a user to interact with the Portal Network from the CLI without having to use an RPC endpoint.
• Reboot the idea of a browser client (or ideally a hybrid framework like Tauri or CapcitorJS where we could deploy a mobile, desktop, and browser client). The challenge here is of course the lack of direct access to the UDP sockets needed to engage with the Portal Network. Likely we need to go back to the proxy in the near term. If we go the route of Tauri or something similar, we could hopefully hook into whatever network backends are exposed by the framework for network connectivity.

Prior art and experiments from our days gone by:

• Our now unmaintained browser client. This should not be the starting point for a new GUI. It's a mess and would likely be very difficult to bring into 2025. That said, it has lots of experiments within it that would be good reference points, an attempt at Tauri, CapacitorJS, and Electron apps that wrapped the react project
• The ui package, which was more or less a GUI for the RPC exposed by the cli package.

[cjustinobi]

Is there additional context or resources I might need to get started with this?