Dumbonet: Introduction

Since my last article about the blockchain network, a lot of things have changed — versions have been upgraded, use cases are evolving, new needs have emerged in industries…. but the idea behind the story is the same.

One of the main values in Comtrade is to share — Knowledge increases by sharing and not by hoarding it. This is something that sets us apart from others and that is why we want to share with the IT community again what we have learned through the process of developing Dumbonet application.

Together with my partners in crime, Marina Kostic and Nemanja Beric, I will lead you step by step through the process.

With support, guidance and mentoring from Sasa Prole and Milan Bundalo, we were able to develop a blockchain-based web application from scratch and this is our way to show them how grateful we are.

Like in any recipe, let’s start with the ingredients. 🍜🍕

What you will be reminded of and what you will learn?

1. Don’t change a winning horse — we will stick with the Hyperledger Fabric platform for building blockchain network but I will tell you also a little bit about the other options.
2. Apache CouchDB is an open-source NoSQL document database that collects and stores data in JSON-based document formats and we can access our documents with a web browser, via HTTP.
3. Our choice for application security is Keycloak. It makes it easy to secure applications and services with little to no code.
4. For the backend side of the application, we will use a JavaScript runtime environment that executes JavaScript code outside of a web browser. It is an open-source, cross-platform called Node.js.
5. Continuing with JavaScript routine, for frontend side choice falls on Angular framework.
6. Besides those core ingredients, we will add a little bit of UI/UX, AB testing, Docker, Nginx and more.

And now, what are we going to bake, oops, sorry, make?

Through this short journey, we will make a blockchain-based web application. The client will be able to do CRUD (create-read-update-delete) operations on two assets. In our case assets are Inquiry and Quotation, but asset can be anything you want — cash, cars, colours, cats…

Blockchain network will have two users from two different organizations which have a specific smart contract between them. User from the first organization is going to create an Inquiry. It is the request where he defines package delivery details and expects offers and the user from the second organization will be able to create this offer as a Quotation.

This was the brief intro to our tutorial about Dumbonet project. You will learn more about everything mentioned above through the series of following articles:

1. Dumbonet: Add authentication to the application using Keycloak
2. Dumbonet: Word-Two about UX/UI
3. Dumbonet: Angular + Keycloak
4. Dumbonet: How to build a blockchain network with Hyperledger Fabric-Part I
5. Dumbonet: How to build a blockchain network with Hyperledger Fabric-Part II
6. Dumbonet: How to write a smart contract in JavaScript
7. Dumbonet: Server side of the application
8. Dumbonet: Grand Final

Thanks for reading and stay tuned! Hope you will enjoy it! 😊