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

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...