Greetings Chromia Developers and Community,
Welcome to the second installment of our mid-month Developer Experience Team Update! The purpose of these updates is to keep Chromia developers up to speed on the improvements being made to documentation, tooling, and network design to support them in the expansion of the Chromia ecosystem.
Please note, “retail updates” focusing on development milestones, network/ecosystem expansion and marketing efforts will continue to be released at the end of each month.
What does “Developer Experience” mean, and why is it important?
In short, Developer Experience is the experience that developers have when they build Dapps for the Chromia platform. In order to attract and retain developers to our ecosystem, we want this experience to be as efficient as possible. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to provide professional grade tools and documentation.
Important News
Chromia’s Testnet Mark 2 was publicly launched on February 7th. It is now possible to deploy a container and launch simple dapps. Read instructions in our documentation here. Dapp functionality is currently limited, but will be expanded in the coming months. View this outline of the Testnet Expansion Phase for more info.
A new official Discord server, Chromia Lounge, was opened to the public on February 7th. When you join the Discord, you have the option of identifying yourself as a developer. The server includes dedicated channels for the developer community.
A Quick Word on Chromia Vault and Chromia Explorer
The current publicly accessible version of Chromia Explorer is showing the activity on the old testnet, which has been deprecated. The development team is currently improving and refining a Mark 2 Block Explorer before making it public.
Similarly, Chromia Vault is not integrated with Testnet Mark 2. Due to the development team’s commitment to integrate with Metamask, it is still being determined if Chromia Vault (as it currently exists) will be necessary and/or desirable moving forward.
Documentation Updates
- Added a page that describes how to launch a dapp on the new public testnet
- Added a new section dedicated to the Chromia CL
- Visit the documentation page
Tooling and Feature Updates
- We have begun work on a CLI Codegen tool which creates Kotlin, Javascript or Typescript implementations of Rell functions. This will greatly increase the speed at which developers can build dapps.
- The Javascript client has been updated to a new endpoint implementation called 'Query-GTV', which enables the use of streams.
- Added Boolean (true/false) type support to the Javascript client.
- The Javascript client was updated to support Node.js 18, while also adding support for ESM, CommonJS and UMD.
What We are Currently Working On
- CLI Codegen tool
- Adding a ‘go to definition’ function for the VS Code Rell plugin to enable more efficient code navigation
- Updating the dapp code examples. The current versions are deprecated due to updates to Rell, Postchain, and the Javascript client. We will start by updating the ‘Chroma chat’ example
- Adding a new section to the documentation dedicated to Network Providers. This documentation will provide support in order to streamline the addition and maintenance of provider nodes on the network.
Until Next Month,
The Chromia Developer Experience 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.
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