Book Image

Advanced Blockchain Development

By : Imran Bashir, Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Advanced Blockchain Development

By: Imran Bashir, Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger with applications in industries such as finance, government, and media. This Learning Path is your guide to building blockchain networks using Ethereum, JavaScript, and Solidity. You will get started by understanding the technical foundations of blockchain technology, including distributed systems, cryptography and how this digital ledger keeps data secure. Further into the chapters, you’ll gain insights into developing applications using Ethereum and Hyperledger. As you build on your knowledge of Ether security, mining, smart contracts, and Solidity, you’ll learn how to create robust and secure applications that run exactly as programmed without being affected by fraud, censorship, or third-party interference. Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll explore how blockchain solutions can be implemented in applications such as IoT apps, in addition to its use in currencies. This Learning Path also highlights how you can increase blockchain scalability, and discusses the future scope of this fascinating and powerful technology. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be equipped with the skills you need to tackle pain points encountered in the blockchain life cycle and confidently design and deploy decentralized applications.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
15
Blockchain - Outside of Currencies
16
Scalability and Other Challenges
Index

Solidity language


Solidity is a domain-specific language of choice for programming contracts in Ethereum. There are, however, other languages that can be used, such as Serpent, Mutan, and LLL but Solidity is the most popular at the time of writing this. Its syntax is closer to both JavaScript and C.

Solidity has evolved into a mature language over the last few years and is quite easy to use, but it still has a long way to go before it can become advanced, standardized, and feature-rich like other well-established languages such as Java, C or C Sharp. Nevertheless, this is the most widely used language available for programming contracts currently.

It is a statically typed language, which means that variable type checking in Solidity is carried out at compile time. Each variable, either state or local, must be specified with a type at compile time. This is beneficial in the sense that any validation and checking is completed at compile time and certain types of bugs, such as interpretation...