Kadena Eco is excited to present a new developer experience with Kadena.JS.
“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” Henry Ford
We’re on the verge of a new and improved front-end experience at Kadena! It’s time to let the community in on how our innovation network, Kadena Eco, is turbocharging R&D efforts to improve our front-end ecosystem and what lies ahead in the coming months. Because we believe that our community members can best help us when they are informed. So along with developing a stellar new front end, another key job is keeping our community apprised every step of the way.
First off: we are currently creating a couple of new libraries that will replace our golden olden — namely, the original library you may know as pact-lang-api.
Fun fact: pact-lang-api was created in late March 2019 and has served the community well. But innovation is constant at Kadena. Although we may shed a few tears, we plan to deprecate this library in the upcoming months. But don’t stay sad for long — our new libraries will replace pact-lang-api with TypeScript support out of the box under the name Kadena.js!
Kadena.js is a Monorepo (mono repository) where we will store all our JavaScript/ TypeScript solutions for our blockchain (libs, tooling, dapps, and so forth). Since we are still in Alpha, we want to get feedback from the community to see how the Alpha is received.
On Friday July 15, we are going to release our first lib called:
cryptography-utils:
*npm install @kadena/cryptography-utils*
which contains encode/decode/hash utils etc.
Our first milestone was the migration of pact-lang-api as is. So the community can start using the library right from the get-go! But be aware at this stage we are going to introduce some breaking changes to the SDK (until we make the library final) to create a good foundation from which we can build an excellent developer experience. So in the Alpha stage, our motto will be: “refactor early, refactor often!” to create better readability, lower complexity, and better UX.
In the upcoming months, we are going to add several more:
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@kadena/chainweb-node-client typed js wrapper to call chainweb-node API endpoints
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@kadena/pact-core low-level generator for pact expressions
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@kadena/pact-cli cli to generate pact contract type definitions and interface to pact client deployment of contracts (apparently the community is already building this 👌)
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@kadena/pact-client wrapper around chainweb-node-client with the ability to switch environments
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@kadena/wallet-client client for a wallet to sign, connect, retrieve account info
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@kadena/marmalade-client — a Marmalade SDK in typescript
We are especially looking forward to @kadena/pact-core to give our module function calls a more TypeScript feel — e.g. this example:
As abstraction layers will become more critical for a better and faster development experience, we first need to focus on getting the implementation details ready. Now that these are ready with our first Alpha release, we will work on making it easy for developers to use our ecosystem on the front-end side.
In the end, Kadena.js will exist with a lot of consumer-level functionalities. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just call one function to transfer assets from one account to another?
We hope you are fond of these new releases from Kadena Eco and help us prepare these libraries for production usage! Please share your feedback with us on our Discord channel, on our GitHub repository, or by contacting me directly at randy at kadena.io.
