Introducing ICON Web Studio
ICON Blockchain has grown remarkably in terms of the number of developers and projects in recent years. Writing SCOREs and deploying on ICON can be rigorous and time-consuming for the new developers. Setting up a local development environment to write SCORE and then deploying it can be a hindrance for many beginners. TechFlow.Space, with the help of CPS funding, has built a web-based IDE that has features like syntax highlighting, file explorer, SCORE interaction, and the ability to deploy and run SCORE on Testnet and Mainnet. This will help beginners to write SCOREs easily and very quickly.
ICON Web Studio is a browser-based IDE for ICON blockchain where developers can write and deploy SCOREs. In simple terms, ICON Web Studio is an editor for SCORE development where users don’t need any pre-installation; they can simply visit the ICON Web Studio Web App, and start developing SCORE right away. ICON Web Studio can be used for the entire span of the SCORE development from design to deployment, acting as a playground for learning and testing SCOREs with ease. ICON Web Studio reduces the time for setting up the environment and speeds up the development time through the inbuilt library of templates and easy-to-use GUI.
ICON Web Studio allows users to create a workspace from four different options:
- Select template from the popular workspace
- Upload SCORE from Local FileSystem
- Import from Git
- Create a new workspace from scratch
Features provided by ICON Web Studio IDE
Templates
ICON Web Studio allows developers to select various templates from the TokenScoreFactory to work on such as Basic IRC2, Complete IRC2, Mintable IRC3, Stable Coin, etc. Having access to a library of templates gives developers the flexibility to choose from a diverse set of preconfigured SCOREs. In addition, having tried and tested templates means developers don’t need to waste time building SCOREs from scratch and can reduce various technical errors. These templates provide a framework for new developers and speed up development time. Similarly, developers can import pre-existing projects from LocalFileSystem. They can also fork existing open-source projects from Github.
Error check
After writing SCOREs, ICON Web Studio outputs all the possible errors, warnings, and suggestions for better code standards.
Project Sharing
Users have the ability to publish workspaces directly to Github Gist from ICON Web Studio. Developers simply need to input their Github Access Token and save it. ICON Web Studio also allows its users to locally download their workspace as a zip file.
Deployment & SCORE Interaction
Developers also can deploy their SCORE on the ICON network from ICON Web Studio whether on Testnet or Mainnet. Once deployed, developers can call its read-only methods, as well as execute write methods through ICONex Wallet. Read/write methods of SCOREs that were previously deployed to the ICON blockchain can also be accessed through ICON Web Studio.
With these features, the ICON web studio provides a simplified go-to platform for ICON developers. The goal for the development of such a product is to facilitate new developers to join the ICON ecosystem and save their time. This way they can focus more on the opportunities for development. We hope this product will be adding more value to the developer community of ICON in the coming days.
Support for Java Smart Contract Development
ICON has been actively working on upgrading to ICON 2.0 and they are also encouraging new SCORE development work to continue on Java. However, the good news also is, we have already started working on a strategy to support Java SCORE development. We will be requesting a CPS grant for the Java SCORE support as an update to ICON Web Studio. The support for Java will take some time to get familiar with but we hope to work on it starting from Q4 2021. Until then, we hope to provide support for the existing python SCORE and keep improving the User experience on the IDE.
The TechFlow.Space team would like to thank ICON Preps for their support in helping us to build this product. Moving forward, we would be grateful for the feedback and suggestions from the community for its improvement.
For any further questions and comments please reach out to us on the following Discord server.
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