Counterfactual Playground, Embark 4.0, Ganache 2.0 and Truffle 5.0.9
Blockchain Dev Weekly Digest 25.03.19
Hello ladies and gents and welcome to your 10 minutes or so of catching up with the madly pacing world of blockchain development.
This week, we have news from Counterfactual and their state channels framework, Truffle, Ganache and web3js, Embark and more.
Tools and Libraries updates
Embark 4.0
Resource: https://embark.status.im/news/2019/03/19/introducing-embark-4/
Embark, the Ethereum development framework by Status, have released their latest major version 4.0, with several major new features building on the last one:
The cockpit — the UI “command center” for embark developers. It contains:
- Dashboard — where you can manage all processes controlled by Embark.
- Interactive console — allowing you to send commands towards the network
- Blockchain explorer — for you to explore your transactions and blocks
- Integrated code editor — allowing you to modify your contracts straight from the cockpit
There is now an integrated debugger for you to use and you’re also able to spawn your own react/angular/vue projects with Embark.
Truffle 5.0.9 Released
Resource: https://github.com/trufflesuite/truffle/releases/tag/v5.0.9
Truffle has released a new version of their framework — 5.0.9. Most notably, this version enables truffle to be used with Quroum through a configuration parameter.
There are also CLI and documentation enhancements and internal bugfixes and optimisations.
Ganache 2.0.0 — Chocolate Birthday Cake
Resource: https://github.com/trufflesuite/ganache/releases/tag/v2.0.0
Ganache has released a new major version. The UI counterpart of ganache-cli has now implemented the advancements of ganache-cli and has added some of its own on top.
New features coming with this release:
- Workspaces — allowing you to save the state of your work and later load it.
- Decode Contract Status — you can easily see your contracts and their name, address and transactions count.
- Events page — this page will gather, decode and list events thrown from your contracts
- Hardforks — you can specify which hardfork version to be work with — Petersburg, Constantinople, or Byzantium.
Web3.js — beta 49
Resource: https://github.com/ethereum/web3.js/releases/tag/v1.0.0-beta.49
Web3.js has released new beta version — beta 49. This release mainly includes bugfixes and architectural reorganisation.
New Libraries and Tools
Vyper-js — Vyper compiler bindings
Resource: https://github.com/plasma-group/pigi/tree/master/packages/vyper-js
The Plasma Group developers have released a library called vyper-js. It contains bindings for the vyper compiler. In essence, it allows you to compile your vyper contracts programatically instead of through the Vyper CLI.
Important note here is that Vyper-js does not install Vyper for you. You still need to do this yourself beforehand.
Vyper-js is something we are looking to integrate into etherlime and allow for vyper to be coming out of the box with the etherlime installation.
ethvtx — Ethereum-Ready & Framework-Agnostic Redux Store
Resource: https://github.com/horyus/ethvtx
ethvtx is a new package containing all the tools needed in order for you to build efficient Redux store for your dapp. The package is framework agnostic and allows you to store, sync and dispatch information from/to the ethereum network. It works with transactions, accounts, contracts and blocks.
Counterfactual Playground
Resource: https://medium.com/statechannels/development-update-3-counterfactual-playground-release-f428be4b8950
The L4 Counterfactual team has released a live demo website allowing to play around with and learn using counterfactual state channels.
Its main goal is to be a learning tool and incorporate several simple apps. Through these you are able to see how you can use the different tools in Ethereum in order to build your own scalable Ethereum dapp.
SOLTIX — Solidity compiler tester
Resource: https://medium.com/chainsecurity/soltix-scalable-testing-of-solidity-compilers-57be270e802b
Being blockchain developer does not only mean that you are developing dapps. Sometimes you might be developing your own compiler. For those of you working on that, the team at ChainSecurity has developed SOLTIX. This tool performs automatic tests of your compiler detecting bugs and discrepancies in the resulting code.
Mist is no more
Resource: https://medium.com/@avsa/sunsetting-mist-da21c8e943d2
In sad news, Mist — the Ethereum browser will now be seeing the sunset. The project that started in the early days of Ethereum has seen little adoption these days due to the rise of great wallets and web3 being on the roadmap of a lot of mainstream browsers. Mist is now considered to descend into oblivion.
Like what you read and perhaps curious about what LimeChain is up to?
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Thanks to all the people that have messaged me about the news this week!
About the author: George Spasov, Co-founder and Blockchain Architect @LimeChain, has developed a multitude of blockchain projects — public and private — and is a prominent member of several blockchains communities. He is most recognized for his work on Etherlime — the ECF and ETHPrize ethers.js-based development and deployment framework, LimePay — the UX solution for executing blockchain transactions with a credit card and being one of the first members of the MetaCartel — the meta-transactions community.
