Hyperledger Composer, centered on Blockchain technology, has been accepted into incubation by Hyperledger’s Technical Steering Committee.

Hyperledger Composer, which is a collaborative effort, will be a tool that will help to build Blockchain business networks.

It’ll help in the development of smart contracts and their deployment across distributed ledgers.

Based on Hyperledger Fabric but portable

In a blog post issued by Hyperledger, they disclose:

“All work done on Composer to date has been done on top of Hyperledger Fabric. However, Composer has been designed so that it can be ported to run on other distributed ledger technologies, such as Hyperledger Iroha or Hyperledger Sawtooth.”

Portability

The reason for portability, according to Hyperledger, is that all Blockchain business networks share elements like assets, participants, identities, transactions and registries.

Hyperledger takes the view that at the moment it can be difficult for organizations to take “Blockchain business use case” and map the concepts into code. Composer promises to change all of that in the same way software modeling tools did so in the software arena.

Enabling developers

To understand where the Composer project is heading, we turn to Brian Behlendorf, Hyperledger’s executive director.

He explains:

“The community's vision for this project (which I share and love) is to make it even easier to design and implement Blockchain business networks. This should make it easier to become a Blockchain developer, to climb the learning curve involved and get everyone more quickly to the point where they can be writing real applications. Hopefully, that brings a lot of new users to the platforms at Hyperledger and leads some of them to become developers of the underlying components.”

Encoding business logic

Hyperledger has kept the modeling language simple but focussed on business.

According to them, the language includes keywords like asset and participant that will help non-developers and developers model their business network.

Composer will provide the ability to encode business logic as “transaction processor functions” which will be written in standard JavaScript, which was chosen because it is a modern and rapidly evolving programming language used by developers around the world.

Community leads

In the beginning, the project will be looked after by Simon Stone, Daniel Selman and Kathryn Harrison of IBM, and Cong Tang and others from OxChain.

However, like with all the projects of the Linux Foundation, things will be community-centred.

Behlendorf tells us: “All Hyperledger projects, like all those at the rest of the Linux Foundation, are driven by the notion that the community leads everything - defining what's needed, designing the overall picture, implementing the pieces and then iterating and improving continuously. The Linux Foundation staff are here to advise, facilitate, keep folks focused on shipping production quality software and provide the process and legal assurance that enterprises need. But it's the developers who are empowered to do all the hard, important bits.”