EOSIO (EOS) developer Block.one has announced the introduction of Demux, an open-source tool that will greatly simplify how the community develops decentralized applications (dApps).

According to their blog post published July 31, the tool is designed to help maintain the platform’s primary advantages of empowering the community to develop decentralized applications that are usable, scalable, and flexible.

Demux seeks to help provide a simpler approach to the many challenges that affect developers due to the complexity of dApps development.

What is Demux about?

According to the Medium post, Demux is inspired by Facebook’s Flux Architecture and Redux. It creates a back-end infrastructural pattern that makes it easy for developers to off-load queries to their off-chain databases.

Facebook uses Flux in developing client-side web applications, and its simplicity means that you can start immediately without the need to have lots of new code.

Demux, on the other hand, is useful when developing JavaScript apps that “behave consistently, run in different environments (client, server, and native), and are easy to test.” It also allows developers to perform live code editing.

The Demux architecture enables dApps developers to use traditional databases like Postgres SQL or Mongo. It’s designed in a manner that makes it possible to use the blockchain to verify the data stored on these databases.

The end result is that developers benefit from the speed and flexibility of these traditional databases. At the same time, the use of the architecture offers the user access to the trust and immutability of blockchain technology.

Problems with complex dApps

The Demux architecture will help developers of complex dApps to directly retrieve data stored on the blockchain. This has been a problem because of the limitation of the query interface used when retrieving indexed data.

There’s also the challenge of scaling query loads, which is more or else expensive due to the requirement of additional endpoint nodes on the blockchain.

EOSIO developers can now benefit from Demux which solves the above issues by off-loading all queries to a user’s preferred database. It works in a way that data gets updated in tandem with blockchain events.

A developer can then query the database using their front-end dApp via APIs like REST. It reduces the frequent need for one to interact with the blockchain to retrieve data.

Block.one has also noted that this tool will also likely be helpful to developers in other ways. For instance, it helps them to greatly reduce the data stored in RAM, a recent problem for EOS. This aspect lowers the operating costs of the dApps, at the same time helping to improve an application’s efficiency.

You can find out more about the tool here.