Fabric Smart Client

The Fabric Smart Client (FSC, for short) is a new Fabric client-side component whose objective is twofold.

FSC aims to simplify the development of Fabric-based distributed application by hiding the complexity of Fabric and leveraging Fabric's Hidden Gems that too often are underestimated if not ignored.
FSC wants to allow developers and/or domain experts to focus on the business processes and not the blockchain technicalities.

Disclaimer

Fabric Smart Client has not been audited and is provided as-is, use at your own risk. The project will be subject to rapid changes to complete the list of features.

Useful Links

Documentation: Discover the design principles of the Fabric Smart Client based on the Hidden Gems of Hyperledger Fabric.
Examples: Learn how to use the Fabric Smart Client via examples. There is nothing better than this.
Feedback: Your help is the key to the success of the Fabric Smart Client.
- Submit your issues here.
- If you have any questions, queries or comments, find us on GitHub discussions.
Fabric Token SDK: Do you want to develop Token-Based Distributed application with simplicity and joy? Check our Token SDK out here.

Motivation

Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned, modular, and extensible open-source DLT platform. Fabric architecture follows a novel execute-order-validate paradigm that supports distributed execution of untrusted code in an untrusted environment. Indeed, Fabric-based distributed applications can be written in any general-purpose programming language.

Developing applications for Hyperledger Fabric is often hard, sometimes painful. Fabric is a very powerful ecosystem whose building blocks must be carefully orchestrated to achieve the desired results. Currently, the Fabric Client SDKs are too limited. They do not offer any advanced capabilities to let the developers focus on the application business processes, and harness the full potential of Fabric.

What would happen if the developers could use a Smart(er) Fabric Client that offers:

A high level API that hides the complexity of Fabric;
A Peer-to-Peer infrastructure that let Fabric Clients and Endorsers talk to each as required by the business processes;
Advanced transaction orchestration;
A simplified model to interact with chaincodes;
A State-based programming model that let you forget about RW sets and focus on business objects and their interactions?

Developing Fabric-based distributed applications would become simpler and joyful. If you are a domain expert, the Fabric Smart Client hides the complexity of Fabric and allows you to focus on the business interactions. If you are a skilled software engineer, you will be able to leverage the full power of Fabric.

Use the Fabric Smart Client

Install

The Fabric Smart Client can be downloaded using go get as follows:

go get github.com/hyperledger-labs/fabric-smart-client

The above command clones the repo under $GOPATH/github.com/hyperledger-labs/fabric-smart-client.

We recommend to use go 1.14.13. We are testing FSC also against more recent versions of the go-sdk to make sure FSC works properly.

Makefile

FSC is equipped with a Makefile to simplify some tasks. Here is the list of commands available.

make checks: check code formatting, style, and licence header.
make unit-tests: execute the unit-tests.
make integration-tests: execute the integration tests. The integration tests use ginkgo. Please, make sure that $GOPATH/bin is in your PATH env variable.
make clean: clean the docker environment, useful for testing.

Executes the above from $GOPATH/github.com/hyperledger-labs/fabric-smart-client.

Testing Philosophy

Write tests. Not too many. Mostly Integration

We also believe that when developing new functions running tests is preferable than running the application to verify the code is working as expected.

Versioning

We use SemVer for versioning. For the versions available, see the tags on this repository.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2 License - see the LICENSE file for details

yacovm/fabric-smart-client