Book Image

Solidity Programming Essentials

Book Image

Solidity Programming Essentials

Overview of this book

Solidity is a contract-oriented language whose syntax is highly influenced by JavaScript, and is designed to compile code for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Solidity Programming Essentials will be your guide to understanding Solidity programming to build smart contracts for Ethereum and blockchain from ground-up. We begin with a brief run-through of blockchain, Ethereum, and their most important concepts or components. You will learn how to install all the necessary tools to write, test, and debug Solidity contracts on Ethereum. Then, you will explore the layout of a Solidity source file and work with the different data types. The next set of recipes will help you work with operators, control structures, and data structures while building your smart contracts. We take you through function calls, return types, function modifers, and recipes in object-oriented programming with Solidity. Learn all you can on event logging and exception handling, as well as testing and debugging smart contracts. By the end of this book, you will be able to write, deploy, and test smart contracts in Ethereum. This book will bring forth the essence of writing contracts using Solidity and also help you develop Solidity skills in no time.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Events and logging


We have seen the usage of events in previous chapters without going into any detail. In this section, however, we will look into events in more depth. Events are well known to event-driven programmers. Events refer to certain changes in contracts that raise events and notify each other such that they can act and execute other functions.

Events help us write asynchronous applications. Instead of continuously polling the Ethereum ledger for the existence of a transaction and then blocking with certain information, the same procedure can be implemented using events. This way, the Ethereum platform will inform the client if an event has been raised. This helps when writing modular code and also conserves resources.

Events are part of contract inheritance, where a child contract can invoke events. Event data is stored along with block data. The logsBloom value is the event data, as shown in the following screenshot:

Declaring events in Solidity is very similar to performing functions...