Developer Experience Team - Monthly Update #17 (May 2024)

May 15, 2024

Greetings Chromia Developers and Community,

Welcome to the mid-month DevEx Update! These updates inform you about the latest improvements being made to documentation and tooling in order to support the growth of the Chromia ecosystem.

Please note, monthly retail updates focusing on mainnet development, partnerships, ecosystem news and marketing efforts are released at the end of each month.

Documentation and Educational Materials

Chromia Technical Blog Series

An article series has been established that will provide technical write-ups from internal Chromia engineers aimed at sharing insights and best practices for building mid-size projects on Chromia.

The first entry, “Exploring Chromia's Project Module Structure” was released on May 8th. Keep an eye out for future entries in this series!

Educational Materials

Chromia Learn currently offers 7 courses and 4 guides. If you’ve never coded in Rell, give it a try!

Tooling and Feature Updates

VS Code Extension

We have integrated Chromia CLI features and commands into the VS Code UI. This allows developers to access these functions quickly and easily, often with one click. These include:

Spin up a terminal in VS Code and execute Rell code
Compile your Rell Dapp
Start up a local node with your Dapp
Update a dapp running on a local node
Generate client stubs, object graphs, and API references of your local Rell project
Install Rell libraries
Generate new Chromia keypairs

Chromia CLI

Removal of deprecated key recovery:
We no longer support the recovery of keys using mnemonic phrases that were created prior to the release of Chromia CLI v0.15.0, when we aligned key generation to the BIP standard.
If you need to recover a key pair using an ‘old’ mnemonic, this can be done by installing an older version of Chromia CLI.
Keypair management updates:
Users can now create keypairs with an id by using the new --key-id option for the Keygen Command. Keys are stored in the .chromia folder in system home as two files: “<key_id>” for the private key, and "<key_id>.pubkey" for the public key. This value defaults to chromia_key if no custom id is specified.
The method described above is the new default for setting your keypair. Setting the keypair explicitly with --secret will take precedence over the default keypair configuration.
It is now easier to switch between keys by updating the new "key.id" property in your config file (e.g., "key.id = myKeyId").
Option --save for KeygenCommand has been renamed to --file

Postchain TypeScript Client

We have made several improvements to the TypeScript Client, increasing the overall type safety of the library.

Current Development Objectives

The VS Code Plugin and Chromia CLI have reached a state of ‘feature-completeness’, and our attention will now shift to maximizing overall stability and increasing the maintainability of the codebase, to prepare for increased open source contributions from the larger Chromia development community.

Until Next Month,

Chromia DevEx Team

About Chromia

Chromia is a Layer-1 relational blockchain platform that uses a modular framework to empower users and developers with dedicated dapp chains, customizable fee structures, and enhanced digital assets. By fundamentally changing how information is structured on the blockchain, Chromia provides natively queryable data indexed in real-time, challenging the status quo to deliver innovations that will streamline the end-user experience and facilitate new Web3 business models.