TL;DR: The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) full node implementation bchd team recently announced their out-of-the-box gRPC API indexing solution with the release of version 0.14.3. “You simply download the binary and run it. That’s it!” they cheered.

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Bitcoin Cash bchd Full Node Implementation Update Includes Public API

“The release of bchd 0.14.3 brings with it a long awaited feature, a public API,” the team’s announcement began, “which makes bchd one of the top indexing blockchain servers in the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem.” The majority of such implementations run and hold relatively less weighted amounts of data to enable wallets, which means they “typically do not compute and store enough data to serve applications such as wallets, block explorers,” etcetera, on BCH.

This pushes devs to servers that in return require yet another set of software installed in addition to the node, which finally gets them to a public API. It amounts to a classic dev headache, as they’re “difficult to install, run, and keep running in a production environment. Further the APIs exposed by these servers are not that great. Insight uses a REST API for some types of data but then requires the use of WebSockets and socket.io for others. Libbitcoin uses ZMQ! Which requires developers to import a large C dependency. Electrum servers use a clunky and cumbersome stratum API. And so on,” the bchd team explained.

The latest version, however, has public indexing ready to go. And though former bchd releases had such ability, it too remained difficult to get at. The team is using gRPC to change all that. Its “new RPC framework created by Google that offers many advantages over the legacy JSON-RPC used in the our ecosystem as well as over various REST/WebSocket APIs.”

Its features appear to focus on the concern of saving time with tasks long-known in the dev community to be downright arduous, such as proper API documentation, divining the meaning of error codes, problems with streaming server data, awkward REST/WebSocket combos, new binaries with data parse errors, etc. “The compiler writes thousands of lines of code so you don’t have to,” the team assures, and invites others to try their public bchd server bchd.greyh.at:8335 for themselves.

DISCLOSURE: The author holds cryptocurrency as part of his financial portfolio, including BCH.

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