Book Image

Building Blockchain Projects

By : Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Building Blockchain Projects

By: Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Blockchain is a decentralized ledger that maintains a continuously growing list of data records that are secured from tampering and revision. Every user is allowed to connect to the network, send new transactions to it, verify transactions, and create new blocks, making it permission-less. This book will teach you what blockchain is, how it maintains data integrity, and how to create real-world blockchain projects using Ethereum. With interesting real-world projects, you will learn how to write smart contracts which run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship, or third-party interference, and build end-to-e applications for blockchain. You will learn about concepts such as cryptography in cryptocurrencies, ether security, mining, smart contracts, solidity, and more. You will also learn about web sockets, various API services for Ethereum, and much more. The blockchain is the main technical innovation of bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for bitcoin transactions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Introduction to web3.js


web3.js provides us with JavaScript APIs to communicate with geth. It uses JSON-RPC internally to communicate with geth. web3.js can also communicate with any other kind of Ethereum node that supports JSON-RPC. It exposes all JSON-RPC APIs as JavaScript APIs; that is, it doesn't just support all the Ethereum-related APIs; it also supports APIs related to Whisper and Swarm.

You will learn more and more about web3.js as we build various projects, but for now, let's go through some of the most used APIs of web3.js and then we will build a frontend for our ownership smart contract using web3.js.

At the time of writing this, the latest version of web3.js is 0.16.0. We will learn everything with respect to this version.

web3.js is hosted at https://github.com/ethereum/web3.js  and the complete documentation is hosted at https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JavaScript-API.

Importing web3.js

To use web3.js in Node.js, you can simply run npm install web3 inside your project directory...