We recently returned from Singapore where we were invited to present at FOSS Asia, a colossal four day technology event that was spread about between Biopolis, Block71 and the newly launched BASH building. We were one of over 100 international speakers, covering topics on everything from moonbeams, building your own laptops, dev-ops and, thanks to us, a little bit of blockchain technology for good measure.
Our ten minutes of fame came when our CTO Mark presented on Building Browser-Based Blockchain Applications to an extremely receptive audience, but before diving into our blockchain framework, let’s take a moment to see how it corresponds with the rest of the stack:
By clicking on and enlarging the image above you will see how we take commodity blockchain data and make it available for a number of applications that utilize our framework. We purposely designed the stack this way because as developers ourselves, we know that simply providing access to commodity data is only solving a part of the problem - it’s what you do with it that counts.
By offering that data in a consistent, developer friendly format that can be used in conjunction with our jQuery based framework, we are able to wrap the complexities of dealing directly with BitcoinJS whilst also providing a number of open-source example applications to help developers more efficiently prototype new ideas, which formed the basis of our presentation:
Since the conference was specifically in regards to open-source software and hardware, we declined to dive-in and talk about our complete stack as our API is proprietary. This allowed us to focus our presentation specifically on our framework, which is entirely API neutral (unless you require Darkcoin support, which is already available in the master branch and will become public later this month - as this is the only blockchain that is currently only supported by our APIs).
As a HTML5 browser-based framework with no central source storing private keys, we have taken a slightly different approach to security with the use of our deterministic salts and compounding encryption. This allows developers to deploy applications that can be recreated and synchronized across multiple devices. The modular nature of the framework and setup process allows developers or end-users to choose just how secure things get, even allowing for the deterministic nature to be removed entirely and replaced with things far more secure than pseudo-randomness.
Current JS modules for our framework include:
We also include a plugin (Market Conditions) and two themes that allow you to see how different applications can utilize different methods and modules, which can be auto-loaded by core using JSON-driven end-points for configuration and even cached using LocalStorage. At NO point - even during development - are any server-side languages (such as NodeJS) required. Everything seen within our demo runs entirely within the browser.
If you’re building on our framework, or have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to get in touch - we’d love to hear about your project.
