Unibright Diaries — Additional Notes on the Demo
On the 26th of October, 2018 the Unibright Framework Demo was showcased at the blockchain meetup in Belgrade. The Demo will be released to the public as a public beta, in Q4 2018. You all then be able to design your own smart contract without a single line of code.
In this blog post, we will elaborate on Unibright Framework’s demo, its functionalities, and benefits. As a user of the Unibright Framework first off you would need to log in. Straight away, the Workflow Designer which is the functionality allowing the user to choose a template will pop up. The Framework offers different templates that are meant for specific use-cases. Such use-cases can be invoice releasing, insurance claim processing, new hire for companies, and many more. During the demo, the focus is on the Multi-Party Approval template.
Moving on, the desired process can be drawn through drag-and-drop functionality. This can be used by someone within your company who is familiar with the process, but does not require smart contract nor programming language knowledge. Therefore, as a company you are not required to hire someone or outsource the work to someone who can set-up the process. Bob, who sits at your desk just needs a few hours of training and some getting accustomed to the Unibright Framework, and we are ready to go. If you are interested to know more about the specific functions and customisation of the platform, then we urge you to check out our Public Demo Walkthrough video.
With the process fully designed, we can move onto validating the workflow. Validating will make sure that the process designed by Bob is feasible and that all the connections are set up properly. For example, the validation checks that there are no cyclic dependancies in the flow — a relation between two or more modules which either directly or indirectly depend on each other to function properly. Cyclic dependencies between components inhibit understanding, testing, and reuse (you need to understand both components to use either). This makes the system less maintainable because understanding the code is harder. Lack of understanding makes changes harder and more error-prone. Also, if components are in a circular dependency they are more difficult to test because they can not be tested separately. Cyclic dependencies can cause unwanted side effects in a software system. There we go! We have a Multi-Party Approval workflow design. The design can then be turned into a smart contract, and then deployed by Bob on the blockchain of his choice. All done through Unibright’s Framework.
Here at Unibright we want to enable companies interact with blockchains by using their existing systems.
The deployed smart contract can now be monitored with our Explorer tool. Here Bob can see whether the smart contract is still pending or it has successfully been deployed. Once our full product will be released, the smart contract with the approval steps will be available to be viewed on a mobile or tablet. This brings efficiency for companies, because usually the person designing the workflow will not be the same person monitoring the workflow.
Unibright allows companies to take care of the design, code generation, publishing, connecting, and monitoring of a blockchain-based business process without reading or writing on single line of code.
For now, we recommend you watch the Demo Walkthrough video to get a better understanding of how the Unibright Framework works and looks. Below you can find questions and answers from our Telegram channel that might shed some more insight about the Demo.
Please keep in mind, that instead of using email addresses as showcased in the video, we could also connect to a SAP-System, a Webservice or something else. We decided for the email adapter, because this is something everyone can use in order to trigger functions once the demo will be publicly available/usable.
Q: In the contract you have to enter emails linked to individual people. How easy is it to change or edit this? Say for example that a certain authoriser goes on maternity leave or maybe if someone quits, etc.
A: In the contract no emails are coded, but wallet addresses. The mapping from an email to a wallet address is made in the Unibright Connector. Therefore, you (or an admin) could change the first part of the mapping. For example, you can enter a different email if the initial person has decided to leave the company.
Q: Can decisions be overruled? Say for example someone approved something that was mislabeled and they recognized their mistake after sending to the wrong address?
A: In the current state of the Multi Party Approval Template, this is not implemented, it is however possible. The template used in the video is just to showcase how Unibright works and it would surely cover 80% of the cases you want to enable when thinking of a “checklist in a blockchain”. We could offer a more sophisticated template (“Multi Party Approval Version 2”) if we see the demand for example.
Q: Which similar solutions are currently available on the market, and how does Unibright compare to those?
A: Addressing all parts of a business process (Design, Publishing, Connecting, Monitoring) on a process level rather than on a technical level, there is no other solution who can do that (at least that we know).
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