Building a complete blockchain application is an ambitious and challenging project, not just because of the range of skills it requires—systems, networking, security, and web application development, to name a few—but because it requires concerted development, testing, and deployment by multiple organizations spanning multiple security domains.
In this chapter, we began with a simple smart contract and ended with a four-peer blockchain network that was ready to drive trade scenarios and store records in a tamper-resistant, shared, replicated ledger. In the process, we learned how to design an organization structure and configure a Fabric network. We learned how to build a channel, or an instance of a Fabric blockchain, get peers in a network to join the channel, and install and instantiate a smart contract on that channel, using the Fabric SDK. We learned how to expose the capabilities of our network and smart contract to end users through web applications, exposing service APIs....