DevEx Update Nov 2023

November 15, 2023

Greetings Chromia Developers and Community,

Welcome to the eleventh installment of our mid-month DevEx Team Update! Our goal is to provide you with the latest updates on the improvements being made to documentation, tooling, and network design to support the growth of the Chromia ecosystem.

Please note, our monthly retail updates focusing on development milestones, ecosystem expansion, and marketing efforts are released at the end of each month.

Documentation and Educational Materials

Chromia Learn

In October, we launched Chromia Learn - an educational platform dedicated to facilitating dapp development within the Chromia ecosystem.

We have recently added two new courses, bringing the total to four:

Continuous Integration Guide - Teaches you how to build and test your dapp in a continuous integration environment.

Rell Masterclass - This course guides developers on how to build efficient and performant Rell code by optimizing underlying SQL statements.

We are already at work building the next course, “Web3 for Web2 Developers”, a hands-on course assisting in the transition from Web2 to Web3.

We appreciate the feedback we have received from the developer community regarding the content on Chromia Learn. Your contributions are being reviewed and used to continuously improve the quality of the materials.

Rell Documentation Restructuring

Work on this objective is ongoing.

Tooling and Feature Updates

Chromia CLI - General Updates

Reads API URL and brid from .chromia/config file as default
Updated to use Rell 0.13.4
Updated to use Postchain 3.13.13
Update to use EIF 0.2.10 module
Unit tests are now executed in a separate database schema dapp-schema>_tests
Whitelisted modules: `chr node start´ will filter out EIF/Anchoring modules before starting

Chromia CLI - Commands

New Command: ‘chr deployment remove’ - removes deployed blockchain from container
New Command: ‘chr eif generate-events-config’ - generates EIF yaml config from Solidity ABI Json input
New Command: Command: ´chr deployment inspect´ - shows Module args for each module
Command ‘chr generate-client-stubs’ now supports --mermaid as language argument and outputs class diagram for mermaid.js https://mermaid.js.org
Added option -c on `chr repl` command to allow execution of single command
Template flag for chr create-rell-dapp --template Template projects:
- Minimal - Minimal working example including sample queries/operations and tests
- Plain - A plain skeleton with empty main and test files
- Plain-Multi - A plain skeleton with empty main and test files using multiple modules

Chromia Explorer

“Most Active dapps” feature has been added.
We are currently upgrading the search functionality to enable filtering by dapp chain - this will give a greatly improved user experience, especially once the network contains numerous dapps.
After this is complete, our next will be building a block visualizer which will assist in debugging and ensuring a specified chain is still building blocks.

VSCode Extension

We have begun the process of refactoring the backend of the VsCode Extension. These improvements will allow us to deliver new features more quickly in the future.

Current Development Objectives

“Web3 for Web2 Developers” Course
Rell documentation restructuring
Expand and improve the Chromia CLI
Improved search functionality and block visualizer for Chromia Explorer
Backend refactor of the VSCode Extension

Until Next Month,

Chromia DevEx Team

About Chromia
Modern society runs on data and every online service you’re using is built upon underlying databases - ranging from your online bank to music streaming and gaming. Chromia is a relational blockchain - a combination of a relational database and a blockchain - making it easy to develop user-friendly decentralized apps for almost any industry, including DeFi, NFTs, gaming, and more.