Announcing EthVigil docs and code examples

Hey developers! 🍾👻🥁🎉

We are stoked to announce the latest direction that BlockVigil has decided to focus its efforts on, beginning with EthVigil — our offering for the Ethereum protocol and ecosystem. We have a platform dedicated to making things easier for developers comfortable with existing web technologies and development stacks to migrate to blockchain development. And what better way to get the ball rolling than primers to let you move past the boilerplate and get to the creative aspects.

Methods on smart contracts are automatically made available as REST-style resources. This is an example of these resource end points bundled into an OpenAPI v3 spec, which can be imported into Postman, among other standardized web development tools.

📕 Docs : https://ethvigil.com/docs

💾 Code examples : https://github.com/blockvigil/api-usage-examples

💌 Sign up for EthVigil Beta are open for a short while: https://beta.ethvigil.com/ (requires Metamask or CLI)

We believe developing end-user applications for Blockchain platforms …

• need not be spent in a tangle of low-level blocking code that deal with integrity and consistency of transactions
• need not be writing boilerplate which is non-standardized across different development suites/toolchains on Ethereum
• need not be about getting lost running around in circles trying to onboard a layperson who might have no interest or spare energy in understanding the philosophy/ethics/morale behind decentralized identity, yet them being forced to interact with highly specialized tools or browsers meant for devs
• need not be misled on the assumption that toy examples on Medium posts somehow transfer well to architecting a project that requires — reliability, fault tolerance, separation of concerns, work queues etc — to deal with scale and volume expected from consumer or enterprise grade applications

Why do we have such strong beliefs? Because we already have HTTP, the unifying glue running mature web applications, services, games etc. A protocol that has already been architected as a standard communication layer atop that standardization of TCP/IP — which itself took quite some effort to arrive at given the complexities of communication dealing with the lower layers of physical networks.

To quote Tim Berners Lee,

What was often difficult for people to understand about the design was that there was nothing else beyond URLs, HTTP and HTML. There was no central computer “controlling” the Web, no single network on which these protocols worked, not even organisation anywhere that “ran” the Web. The Web was not a physical “thing” that existed in a certain “place”. It was a “space” in which information could exist.

It seems as if the holy grail of “decentralization” that everyone seems to be after, was right at our fingertips all along 😉