Developer Experience Team - Monthly Update #16 (April 2024)

April 15, 2024

Greetings Chromia Developers and Community,

Welcome to the 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 mainnet development, ecosystem expansion, and marketing efforts are released at the end of each month.

Documentation and Educational Materials

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

Documentation

We have adapted Dokka, an API documentation engine for Kotlin, to work with Rell.

Using this tool, we have generated an API reference page for the Rell System Library. You can view the reference page here.

We have also completed the process of generalizing the tool so developers can use it to create API reference pages for the functions and types available within their applications. The tool has already been integrated into Chromia CLI.

To view an example of the documentation generated by this tool, check out this API reference generated by the My Neighbor Alice team.

Tooling and Feature Updates

Chromia Explorer

In early April, we released a UI update to Chromia Explorer. While we will be making minor tweaks to Explorer as needed in the coming months, we are currently directing development resources to other tasks in preparation for mainnet.

VS Code Extension

The VS Code Extension has been updated to support the latest version of Rell, v0.13.10.

We are currently working on integrating a variety of Chromia core features, so they can be directly accessed from within the VS Code UI. These features include:

Sending queries and transactions to a blockchain
Building and testing dapps
Deploying dapps
Running dapps on a local node

Chromia CLI

Improved error messages that are generated when compiling dapps. Now, if there are errors in chromia.yml, the message will specifically highlight where the issue is located and provide guidance on what is expected.
Introduced a new command, ‘chr generate docs-site’. This command enables users to generate a static API reference page for their created dApps. Enable users to easily document their dApps and share comprehensive API references with others.
Option “fail on error” that can be true and false is added for the test command, which will take precedence when running test over any other configuration.
We have released a native Windows version of Chromia CLI. This means that Windows users no longer need to run Chromia CLI through Docker. Please note that this release is in an experimental Alpha phase. We have distributed it using Scoop.
- To install it on Windows you first would need to have scoop package manager installed, follow the steps on: https://scoop.sh/#/ under Quickstart
- Then add the Chromia bucket to your scope manager by running the following command in your shell: scoop bucket add chromia https://gitlab.com/chromaway/core-tools/scoop-chromia/
- Then install chr with: scoop install chr
Updated Chromia CLI to support the latest version of Rell (v0.13.10).
- In Rell 0.13.10, a notable feature is strictGtvConversion. This flag in chromia.yml allows users to configure their Dapp to prevent automatic type transformation by Gtv to match query/operation input types. For example, if a query expects an integer type, setting strictGtvConversion to true will disallow sending a big_integer to this query. The default and recommended value for this flag is true.

Postchain TypeScript Client

We are improving the overall type safety of the library, and this work will be completed in the next few weeks. There will be no change from the user’s perspective, but the end result will be enhanced security and reduced risk of bugs.

Current Development Objectives

Integrating core feature calls to the VS Code interface
Type safety improvements to the Postchain Typescript Client

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.