Book Image

Learn Blockchain Programming with JavaScript

By : Eric Traub
Book Image

Learn Blockchain Programming with JavaScript

By: Eric Traub

Overview of this book

Learn Blockchain Programming with JavaScript begins by giving you a clear understanding of what blockchain technology is. You’ll then set up an environment to build your very own blockchain and you’ll add various functionalities to it. By adding functionalities to your blockchain such as the ability to mine new blocks, create transactions, and secure your blockchain through a proof-of-work you’ll gain an in-depth understanding of how blockchain technology functions. As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll learn how to build an API server to interact with your blockchain and how to host your blockchain on a decentralized network. You’ll also build a consensus algorithm and use it to verify data and keep the entire blockchain network synchronized. In the concluding chapters, you’ll finish building your blockchain prototype and gain a thorough understanding of why blockchain technology is so secure and valuable. By the end of this book, you'll understand how decentralized blockchain networks function and why decentralization is such an important feature for securing a blockchain.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Adding the block explorer file

Let's understand how to set up the block explorer frontend. The block explorer will be a user interface with which we can interact with the blockchain from the browser. In order to build this user interface and make it functional, we need to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Now, instead of building all of the frontend by yourself, you can find an entire prebuilt frontend at the following link: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-Blockchain-Programming-with-JavaScript/blob/master/dev/block-explorer/index.html. We're not building the entire frontend in this section, because that's not the focus of this book.

To build the frontend, all you have to do is copy the file from the link provided and add that to the project's file structure. Now, go to the dev folder and create a new folder inside it, called block-explorer. Inside this...