Behind The Scenes of Launching TronGrid 2.0 on the TRON Blockchain
In October 2018, TRON officially opened the doors for developers to build on the blockchain. Over the last several months, our engineering team worked on creating a full suite of developer tools that provide a seamless experience for new developers joining TRON. One of the major tools, TronGrid, is getting an upgrade to TronGrid 2.0!
“TronGrid is an infrastructure used by many developers. The newest update aims to be more comprehensive, reliable, and available, providing an intuitive user experience that helps developers to focus their energy where it matters most — business and decentralized applications.” — Cong Li, Head of Tron Protocol, US
What is TronGrid?
TronGrid enables developers to build on the TRON blockchain by providing running full nodes in different regions around the world and APIs into the TRON network. Running your own full nodes often requires hardware investment, bandwidth, and time to maintain or secure data. TronGrid provides an alternative for developers that is currently free of charge and fully integrated with developer tools such as TronWeb. TronGrid makes DApp development easy and affordable.
“I was working on Ethereum when Infura first came out. From the get-go, I knew that Infura was a necessary tool and a game changer. When I was designing TronGrid v2, I kept that vision in mind, striving to build a faster, more reliable service.” — Francesco Sullo, Tech Lead of Dev Tools at TRON
What are the significant differences between TronGrid 1.0 vs 2.0?
TronGrid 1.0 was a great start in providing a costless alternative to hosting your own full nodes. With TronGrid 2.0, the response time needed to query events has been reduced significantly: recent event information can be returned within milliseconds. This an important upgrade because events are a critical part of the life of a dApp and require high performance.
After redesigning the infrastructure and automating the troubleshooting process, TronGrid 2.0 has reached a new level of consistency and availability. Any user from around the world is now able to read the most recent events. The overall uptime is 99.99%. TronGrid main net status can be found here: https://status.trongrid.io/
“TronGrid has always been a priority for us as we see a steady increase in traffic coming to the tool. The traffic also shows that more developers are building on the TRON blockchain.” — Yue Fang, Product Manager at TRON
How did we test TronGrid 2.0 before the launch?
First, we tested internally and ran multiple rounds of stress tests. These tests clearly showed that event queries were significantly faster. The team fixed all the bugs that surfaced and rolled out the new system in Oregon for beta testing, providing temporary APIs that were distinctive from TronGrid 1.0.
During beta testing of the 2.0 version, TronGrid 1.0 was still fully functional. The team monitored the performance and feedback reported by the community during this time. After ironing out the kinks and bugs during beta testing, the team propagated the new system globally. TronGrid 2.0 is now successfully updated on the main net.
“We have seen a lot of development efforts on TronGrid over the last few months. From a performance perspective, but more importantly, a documentation perspective. TronGrid has quickly become one of our preferred TRON blockchain interaction methods.” — Juliun Brabon, Co-founder and Chairman of Sesameseed.
Sesameseed is a TRON Super Representative and runs the SeedGerminator, a DApp and technology accelerator for the Tron Network.
“TronGrid is the best way to access the TRON Network for beginner developers. Enjoy the power of a blockchain at the learning cost of just a RESTful API (which is almost no cost). What is even better is that the nodes are load-balanced and geo-optimized, so your apps are always ready to utilize the network with high throughput and low latency.” — Tong Shen, Co-founder and CTO of TronBoston.
TronBoston is a TRON Super Representative Candidate run by Spark Blockchain, based in Boston. Spark Blockchain is a leading blockchain consulting and incubation company in North America with developer relations at its core.
What’s next?
Many thanks to the dev tool team — Francesco Sullo, Jialiang Zhou, Joseph Ghantous — who spent many late nights and weekends developing TronGrid 2.0. Now TronGrid is undergoing a bigger update, optimizing APIs beyond event queries and adding exciting new features that will make DApp development easier. Stay tuned.
For more information, visit our documentation site https://developers.tron.network/docs/tron-grid-intro or reach us on Discord!
