Preface

Hyperledger is an umbrella project of modular open source frameworks and tools for building and experimenting with blockchains. The Hyperledger Cookbook provides hands-on experiences and in-depth illustrations covering the full spectrum of Hyperledger offerings. You will not only learn a range of permissioned business blockchain technologies, including Fabric, Sawtooth, Burrow, Iroha, and Indy, but also a set of tools to work with these blockchain frameworks, including Composer, Explorer, and Caliper.

Each chapter contains a set of recipes that helps the reader to become more familiar with Hyperledger blockchain and its tools. The examples in this book will help readers to apply Hyperledger technologies to their own problems.

Who this book is for

This book is for blockchain developers who want to learn about the permissioned blockchain technologies for business offered by Hyperledger. With an abundance of recipes covering distributed ledger networks, smart contract engines, client libraries, and various tools in Hyperledger technologies, blockchain developers can apply them to rapidly develop decentralized DLT systems for their enterprises. For more experienced blockchain developers, the recipes covered in this book might expose them to new ways of thinking in terms of how to select and build enterprise blockchain for their business use cases.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Working with Hyperledger Fabric, concentrates on the fundamental Fabric architecture and components. The recipes cover installation, building a Fabric network, adding an org to a channel, integrating with CouchDB, and writing your first Fabric application.

Chapter 2, Implementing Hyperledger Fabric, is dedicated to building a simple device asset management DApp. The example covers recipes designed to show how to design and write a chaincode smart contract, compile and deploy Fabric chaincode, run and test the smart contract, develop a DApp, and interact with Hyperledger Fabric chaincode through the client SDK API.

Chapter 3, Modeling a Business Network Using Hyperledger Composer, contains recipes designed to show how to use the Composer tool to rapidly develop use cases, build blockchain business networks using the Composer model language, deploy, test and export BNA using the Composer CLI tool, and interact with Composer through the SDK.

Chapter 4, Integrating Hyperledger Fabric with Explorer, this includes installing, setting up, and configuring Hyperledger Explorer, integrating with the Hyperledger framework, and running the Hyperledger Explorer application.

Chapter 5, Working with Hyperledger Sawtooth, includes recipes for installing, deploying, and running DApps with Hyperledger Sawtooth. With the help of Hyperledger Sawtooth's modular architecture, distributed ledger, distributed data storage, and decentralized consensus, several examples demonstrate how to build a transaction processor, design a namespace and address, grant permission on the Sawtooth network, and develop client applications with the Sawtooth RestAPI and SDK.

Chapter 6, Operating an Ethereum Smart Contract with Hyperledger Burrow, contains recipes about how to write smart contracts with Solidity, deploy and interact with Ethereum smart contracts on Burrow, invoke smart contracts with Seth CLI and RPC, and create externally owned accounts on Seth. This chapter also covers the permissioning of Ethereum EOA and contract accounts on Seth.

Chapter 7, Working with Hyperledger Iroha, covers several recipes associated with working with Hyperledger Iroha, including installing and configuring Hyperledger Iroha, and interacting with Hyperledger Iroha using the client library. This chapter also provides an example demonstrating how to use Iroha CLI to create a cryptocurrency.

Chapter 8, Exploring the CLI with Hyperledger Indy, covers the installation of Hyperledger Indy and the exploration of Indy CLI with Hyperledger Indy.

Chapter 9, Hyperledger Blockchain Scalability and Security, contains recipes about how to measure Hyperledger blockchain performance using the Hyperledger Caliper tool, how to design and implement highly scalable Hyperledger blockchain, and how to build a secure Hyperledger consortium network with Fabric CA.

Appendix, Hyperledger Blockchain Ecosystem, mainly targets those individuals who are relatively new to distributed ledger technology and permissioned blockchains. It covers Hyperledger blockchain concepts, the important technical design methodology of the Hyperledger ecosystem, and explores when to apply these technologies through real-world use cases.

To get the most out of this book

To better understand and follow the recipes in this book, it will help if you have some basic knowledge of blockchain technology and cryptograph concepts, have a basic understanding of programming languages for JavaScript, Go, and Python, some basic Unix skills, in particular, shell command, and are familiar with basic flows for launching and running applications in the cloud, such as Amazon AWS.

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Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Install Node.js, npm, and Python."

A block of code is set as follows:

type Chaincode interface {
    Init (stub ChaincodeStubInterface) pb.Response
    Invoke (stub ChaincodeStubInterface) pb.Response
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

  $ sudo apt-get update

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Click on the Query Chaincode button."

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Sections

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it..., How it works..., There's more..., and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, use these sections as follows:

Getting ready

This section tells you what to expect in the recipe and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.

How to do it...

This section contains the steps required to follow the recipe.

How it works...

This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.

There's more...

This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to increase your knowledge of it.

See also

This section provides helpful links to other useful information for the recipe.

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