Developer Experience Team - Monthly Update #12

Greetings Chromia Developers and Community,

Welcome to the twelfth 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

We now have two different categories of content, sorted by length and scope:

“Courses” are longer tutorials guiding users through the coding of a dapp.
“Guides” are shorter, focusing on a specific topic or task.

Since the last update, we have added the following:

Course: “Web3 for Web2 Developers”
Course: “Event-driven multi-blockchain dapp”
Guide: “Build your dapp in continuous integration”
Guide: “Write integration tests in TypeScript for your dapp”
Guide: “How to work with timestamps in Rell”
Guide: “How to group a list to a key”

Rell Documentation Restructuring

All necessary revisions have been completed. The Rell documentation will be continuously improved as needed moving forward.

Tooling and Feature Updates

Chromia CLI

CLI interface has been updated to display how long it took to execute a unit test.
The key generator command has been updated to conform with BIP39 and BIP32 standards.
Before deployment of a Dapp, the Rell version in your chromia.yml file will be validated against the minimum Rell Version of the targeted cluster. This ensures that all nodes in the cluster are running a version greater or equal to the version set in your dapp configuration.
Compression has been implemented when deploying a new Dapp and updating an existing one. This compression makes it so that one will not send an un-change file up to the cluster. The compressed configuration that will be deployed is outputted to the <name-of-dapp>_compressed.xml so the user can view what it looks like
It is now possible to run a blockchain test for a specific module with your dapp by using the -bc flag, i.e. `chr test -bc <name-of-blockchain> -m <name of module>`

Chromia Explorer

We have completed improvements to the search function, making it possible to filter results by dapp.

We are now working on visualizing blocks for each blockchain for the purpose of debugging and confirming that a given chain is still actively building blocks. For each blockchain, you will see the current block height, the latest blocks that were built and also have the ability to search for a specific block.

VSCode Extension

The team is still working on refactoring our language server. We are expecting to complete this task and release a new implementation of the VSCode Extension with additional features in January.

Postchain TypeScript Client

We are working to implement a feature that will allow the client to set a node to ‘unreachable’ based on request-responses. This means that a faulty node will not be used for requests until a configurable duration of time has passed.

Current Development Objectives

Expand and improve the Chromia CLI
Develop for content for Chromia Learn
Update the Chromia Learn UI to improve content organization
VSCode language server refactor and version update
Block visualizer for Chromia Explorer

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.