May 16, 2023
Greetings Chromia Developers and Community,
Welcome to the fifth 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, network/ecosystem expansion, and marketing efforts will continue to be released at the end of each month.
Important News
On May 3, a major upgrade was deployed for the Testnet, establishing multi-cluster support and cross-chain communication (ICMF and ICCF). When the testnet is upgraded, network data is reset. This is expected behavior and will occur at various times on the path to mainnet. Developers who require persistent application data are encouraged to set up a private network. Information on how to do this can be found here.
Documentation Updates
- Additional details were added to the Network Provider documentation, completing the initial version of this section.
- Work has begun on a documentation section dedicated to the FT4 token standard, which is currently being developed by the Protocols team.
- The DevEx team is discussing the most optimal and intuitive way to present the existing documentation. After decisions are made regarding this, we anticipate spending some time reorganizing content.
- We are also exploring the possibility of functionally integrating the developer documentation with the developer section on the Chromia website
Tooling and Feature Updates
- The Chromia CLI has been updated to support Rell 0.12.1
- We have completed our preliminary analysis of the existing block explorer and have identified several improvement goals, including:
- Providing more analytics and network metrics, such as the number of deployed dapps, transaction counts, etc.
- Presenting chains in a more organized fashion by clearly delineating system chains (i.e. anchoring chain, directory chain, etc.) from dapp chains.
- Displaying more information about current providers, and their status
- We have deployed the first iteration of the Rell package manager. The package manager is a way to distribute libraries and allow programmers to streamline the dapp development process. For example, they will be able to easily import token standards. Over time, the number of packages/libraries will increase, accelerating development speed across the ecosystem.
- We have begun creating a Rell plugin for IntelliJ. IntelliJ is a popular IDE (Integrated Development Environment) used by Javascript developers.
- We have begun optimizations for the Postchain API that facilitates communication between a dapp’s backend (Rell) with its client-side (Javascript, Typescript, Kotlin, etc.) in order to make it more reliable and efficient.
What We Are Currently Working On
- Improving the Block Explorer
- Finalizing and enacting decisions about documentation organization and developer page integration
- Completing the Rell plugin for IntelliJ
- Completing the Postchain API upgrade
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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