Am starting to learn and develop a fabric.
Am bit confused over, whether to start development with fabric Composer or to go with full end development as in fabric samples?
From my experience, it is better to go for fabric first to understand the blockchain, and how it works and to see all the components.
Composer is pretty easier, you can build applications, but you will not understand the details of blockchains, although the composer is deploying its output bna file on fabric.
Composer is just tool, not the framework itself.
I'm sure that composer is easy for you, and you will become productive much faster
Related
I am a newcomer to the Hyperledger world. While exploring the options to build the blockchain network, I came to the two options.
Hyperledger Cello
Minifabric (https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/minifabric/)
Both the projects are under the hyperledger-labs repo.
I like to understand the purposes of these 2 projects, I looking for an option that can help me to focus on the application layer/Chaincode rather than messing into the multihost network management.
by the way at last I need to deploy the project on production. Possibly I will be using on-premises machines and cloud VMs both. Also, I am looking for options to lay down the production network as well.
In addition to the excellent response by Kekomal, you might also want to consider looking at the free IBM Blockchain Platform extension for VSCode (can be found in the VSCode extensions marketplace). This is designed to help you focus on the application/chaincode layer and provides an inbuilt fabric you can use for testing
For your purpose, use Minifabric. I find it the simpler, faster and lighter way to start your development network to test your chaincodes.
Cello is more oriented to build and maintain your pre-production or production network as a service.
By the way, there is a third option that is building your network from Fabric docker images and Fabric tools, which is the best method to learn how your Fabric network really works. But, for your purpose, I would use Minifabric.
I've been studying the Hyperledger Fabric framework reading the docs for quite a while now but I'm getting a little lost in the middle of all that info. My question is: Is there any guidelines/"Step by step" on how to design a blockchain network from scratch? If you are starting a new project, where do you start?
Because I think I would understand it way more quicker if I actually started coding a little instead of reading and reading and reading...
Thanks a lot!
Edit 1:
I've chosen #kekomal answer as the correct one but I'd like to thank #Isha Padalia for the awesome VS Code extension and tutorial.
If you are really interested in learning and diving into Hyperledger Fabric, avoid byfn script. It performs a lot of magic for building a very simple Hyperledger Fabric network. After that, you have a network that you don't know how has been created and you have absolutely no idea of how to start deploying your custom network. There are daily questions here from people who started that way and are absolutely lost.
I find interesting this tutorial: https://medium.com/beyondi/setup-the-hyperledger-fabric-network-from-scratch-b82913b47549. Take into account that it is a little bit outdated.
You can complement it with this newer tutorial: https://www.blockchainexpert.uk/blog/how-to-deploy-hyperledger-fabric-network-from-scratch. Don't only run the steps. Analyze the files in https://github.com/blockchain-expert/hyperledger-fabric-network-from-scratch. Try playing with configtx.yaml, crypto-config.yaml and docker-compose files to customize your network and understand what you are doing.
Customize your organizations, your consortiums, your ordering service, your peers... Create your channels, join them, update your anchor peers... And understand what you are doing.
After that, if your network had one orderer, deploy a new one with more than one (with Raft consensus). If your network was using cryptogen, deploy a new one using Fabric-CAs instead. Or you can follow by playing with chaincodes.
NOTE: Apart from Hyperledger Fabric itself, it is essential to have basic notions of docker and PKI.
You are a beginner in Hypelredger fabric development then you have first cleared the concept of the orderer, peer, CA, and organization concept. And then first you have to start IBM Blockchain Platform VS Code extension for fabric. It will provide a local fabric environment to create, test and deploy a fabric smart contract. Also generate 1 peer, 1 orderer, 1 CA service under VS code environment.
Here is a link to start development with VS code extension.
Hope it will help you:)
hi #d3v9 start from here https://hyperledger-fabric.readthedocs.io/en/release-1.4/build_network.html. also you can find some great article on medium
I would like to learn a little bit from Blockchain and I need to make an university task based on this question.
The main idea is to conceptually learn about what should an environment need to develop and deploy the blockchain solutions.
My problem is that I am not a developer and I am an industrial engineer. This is my first experience with something like this and I have no idea about this stuff. I read a lot about this on github sites about some of these platforms, mostly Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. I am very confused about what I have read is the need of an application generator, a code editor, containers such as dockers, something about APIs and REST servers, CLI tools, Frameworks, clients, libraries as node.js or npm...
I know how Blockchain works but I do not have an idea of how to create it and start with it.
So I need a list of the vital tools because I did not find anything well explained for a beginner.
Thank you.
Consider taking the Hyperledger "Introduction to Blockchain Development" course. It's free, unless you want a certificate.
https://www.edx.org/course/blockchain-for-business-an-introduction-to-hyperledger-technologies
Hyperledger has multiple blockchain platforms, such as Sawtooth or Fabric. They are all permissioned blockchains and do not use cryptocurrency.
If you want to use a public blockchain that uses cryptocurrency, consider Ethereum.
I am new to hyperledger and bit confused about hyperledger composer & nodejs api.
I saw using composer we can create assets, transactions, participants and chaincode and in last we have to archive it this all into .bna file and finally we deploy this chaincode into network using admin card
But at other end using NodeJs API we can also write chaincode by overiding init & invoke methods.
How can we relate these all.
The best way to think about this is the following:
1) Hyperledger Fabric v1.1 supports writing chaincode in two languages: Golang and JavaScript via Node.js
If you want to do all of the heavy lifting yourself, you can write straight chaincode.
2) Hyperledger Composer provides a higher-level model-driven language for developing smart contracts. It currently only allows deployment of these artifacts to Hyperledger Fabric. It also happens to support writing functions in JavaScript as well.
So if you want to start from a higher-level model-driven approach, Hyperledger Composer is the way to go. If you want to write all of the plumbing yourself or use very low-level chaincode features, then using chaincode itself is the way to go.
Moving forward, we are looking at a better way to move between the two and not force a decision / direction up front.
There is another option, we develop a framework called Convector to be in the middle of Composer (high abstraction, low control) and raw code (low abstraction, high control, therefore high risk). We open sourced it a few days ago. At WorldSibu we don't like loosing so much control over our code like with Composer but as Gari Singh was saying, doing all the heavy lifting for each project is crazy. It is like a Mongoose for Hyperledger Fabric. It may help to check it out.
It is also worth noting that, according to IBM, Composer is no longer recommended as a production solution, but only for prototyping. In HLF 1.3, chaincode can now be written in Go, Javascript and Java.
I have been working on hyperledger fabric for some time. But I don’t understand where hyperledger composer comes in place . I do understand that it helps in visualizing the logic and transaction. But what I don’t get is how do you integrate it with fabric network? what does it create? Is it chaincode if not then what?
The Compose runtime is chain code that executes the business network archive artefacts created by the end-user.
Perhaps this will help?
https://blog.selman.org/2017/07/08/getting-started-with-blockchain-development/
The tech answer is that Hyperledger Composer is an abstraction layer over Hyperledger Fabric.
The practical answer is that it is awesome. Think how Angular and hundreds of other frameworks make web programming easier.
It is a framework where you can write your blockchain in Javascript and specify your data objects in an easy to understand text file. Throw in some querying, ACL stuff and pathways to use some nice opensource tools that let you do things like generate a Web API automatically and play around in a web environment without installing anything.
We are using it for the Integra Ledger Legal blockchain. (www.integraledger.com). I just spent the day working in it.