Holochain-Rust 0.0.2 Released! Time to #BUIDL!

Holochain Dev Pulse 05

Holochain Design

Published in

Holochain

4 min readDec 4, 2018

Summary

We’re so excited to share with our community that we’ve released the Developer Preview of Holochain-Rust 0.0.2, just in time for our November Dev Camp thanks to the marathon efforts of our core team! This new release is an important milestone because it finally brings together all the tooling you need to start building real Holochain apps. You can read more on our new developer portal!

Highlights

Hc Command-Line: Updated hc command-line tool for Windows, Mac, and Linux *Important tools you will need to build amazing Holochain apps
Multi-Agent Testing: See how your apps function in a local sandbox
Hc-Web-Client (Prototype): We’re developing a library that makes it easy for a web app to talk to Holochain
New Developer Documentation Website: Get all your answers, developer tools, and resources in one place
HoloChat Demo App now running on Holochain-Rust

Details

1. Hc Command-Line: Updated hc command-line tool for Windows, Mac, and Linux

The most visible update in this new release is an all-in one Holochain command called `hc`. It lets you:

•Create a new Holochain project (`hc init`)
•Scaffold a new ‘zome’ in your project, which writes all the boilerplate code and saves you a lot of typing (`hc generate`)
•Compile all your code and get it ready for running and distributing (`hc package`)
•Run automated tests to catch errors in your app (`hc test`)
•Start up a basic Holochain node instance to test with your GUI (`hc run`)

Combined with multi-agent scenario testing in node.js, this toolkit gives you everything you need to start building an application.

So download and install the new release for your favorite OS, open your favorite code editor, and start writing an app!

If you’re new to Rust, here’s a getting started guide with exercises you can run in your browser, and an introductory video. StackOverflow users have voted Rust the “most loved programming language” for the last three years, so don’t let lack of familiarity get you down — you’re going to get it and you’re going to love it!

2. Multi-Agent Testing with the new Node.js Library

We’ve published an updated holochain-nodejs library to NPM.

If you’re a developer, this is an exciting development, because you can now test multiple instances of an app, talking to each other as if they were agents on a fully-functioning Holochain network.

The library is thanks to our recent work on a new mock networking layer. This is the final piece necessary for writing comprehensive tests to make sure your app works the way you expect before you release it into the wild. When the full networking layer is ready, it’ll function exactly the same, so there should be no difference between local testing and the real thing.

One note: When one agent publishes an entry to the DHT, it takes a few moments to saturate, just like it would in the real world. We recommend waiting for a few moments between calling `commit_entry()` and `get_entry()` on the same piece of data.

3. Hc-Web-Client (Prototype): We are developing a library that makes it easy for a web app to talk to Holochain

As we mentioned in last week’s Dev Pulse, when you build a Holochain app, you can connect your graphical interface to the running app via WebSocket.

If you’re building your interface as a web app, we’ve created a drop-in JavaScript library that makes it ten times easier to talk to Holochain.

Download it from GitHub and let us know what you think. In the near future, we’ll be developing and releasing a HTTP interface.

4. New Developer Documentation Website: Get all your answers, developer tools, and resources in one place

Now that our new version of Holochain is mature enough to start creating apps, we’ve published the new documentation to https://developer.holochain.org . There you’ll find the guidebook, the API docs and a link to the original documentation for holochain-proto.

5. HoloChat Demo App now running on Holochain-Rust!

Nicolas Luck, one of our core devs, helped build an app called HoloChat at the first Holochain hackathon back in March 2018. We’ve now re-released it for the new Holochain-Rust.

We used it as a teaching tool in our DevCamp this past weekend. If you’d like to see how an entire app is built, you can download it from GitHub and explore the source code at your own pace.