What’s New at Cardstack?

The framework is ready and we’re building cards.

We’ve been busy bees, building, strategizing, and planning for the future of Cardstack — and, most importantly, executing those plans. In case you missed some of our recent developments, here’s the latest update!

Core Card Catalog

We’re currently building a set of ready-to-launch default cards that will be shipped, to jump-start the catalog of card-based experiences. To that end, our team is focusing on feature development on top of APIs, based on the Cardstack and the Ember frameworks.

Our goal is to make Cardstack the quickest way for developers to get their decentralized apps to market. Instead of building a whole app from scratch, they only need to build the main card (e.g. a podcast card or a KYC form card). They can reuse all the cards in the Card Catalog to add features, such as login, dashboard, workflow, and messaging to their dApp, to complete the user experience. End users can then use these cards like mini-apps.

The first cards we are working on center around the ideas of forms and messages, requests and signatures, as well as articles — which show you how our concepts of Card Space and Card Flow work together to support all kinds of online business processes, making them not only much easier, but extremely efficient. Stay tuned for details regarding the newest creations to come out under the Cardstack umbrella!

Cardstack & Ember

We leverage the codebase of the Ember.js project, unbundling and reusing the internals of a mature, open-source JavaScript framework that is designed to build stand-alone Web apps — with the aim to augment it to a framework that assembles modular “cards”.

In Q1, Cardstack sponsored the development of a new build system called Embroider, which we battle-tested during EmberConf in March, to make sure that it supports all existing use cases. Embroider allows for dynamic loading of templates and logic, and is designed to become an alternate build system for regular Ember apps. It is even more powerful in Cardstack applications, as it enables users to “install” new cards in their environment by simply pasting the URL of a card that is used by another user.

We recently welcomed Jen Weber to our development team! Jen spent more than a year on the Ember Learning Core Team and is now a member of the Ember.js Core Team. At Cardstack, she will improve the developer experience for the Cardstack Framework and protocol, thus enabling more and more Web developers to harness the power of Web 3.0.

Jen takes you on a quick tour through the Cardstack Framework, offering valuable insights from the perspective of someone familiar with Ember.

Cardstack Framework

The application framework is now in great shape. It’s ready for developers to start playing around with it, to make their own contributions to Cardstack.

We’ve built a system for content management:

Card Board, our Web publishing system, is already open-sourced, and still getting updated as we improve the front-end experience of editing articles. Gitchain is the back-end for this system. We are in the process of porting the Hyperledger layer to Solidity on Ethereum, so that more people can play with Card Board without having to stand up a Sawtooth instance.

We’ve built a system for data management:

In cooperation with our partner dotBC, we made sure that the Cardstack Framework can model the complex data sets of recordings, releases, musical works, artists, publishers, and labels that were provided by Warner Music Group and Warner/Chappell Music. The result is a blockchain-based music metadata management system, which we created for the music industry and shipped in Q1 of this year.

Moving forward, we will continue to improve our framework, including the basic infrastructure for Card Space and Card Flow, so that Cardstack can support more and more use cases in the decentralized content, data management, and finance space. Get ready to help us create amazing Web 3.0 experiences, connecting blockchain and cloud data sources. Let’s start building on top of our framework!

Watch our newest videos

Here’s our newest teaser video about the future of content creation and distribution — done the Web 3.0 way!

Cardstack enables makers, storytellers, developers, and designers to come together to form decentralized networks and finally create on their own terms.

Watch Chris Tse’s technical talk to learn about Gitchain — a chain-agnostic Layer-2 application state synchronization & syndication protocol based on Git. He explains how Git complements the blockchain perfectly, to support end-user-facing decentralized applications on the open Web. Additionally, there’s an in-depth article and a technical demo to go with it.

In this strategy talk, Chris Tse presents the concept, power, and value of cards for developers and end users — while giving insights into the current state of and the future strategy for the Card SDK and, consequently, the Card Catalog.

Check out this screencast, where Jen Weber codes live, demonstrating how to convert a Cardstack package into TypeScript. She shows and explains what TypeScript can do and how you can use it in your own codebases.

More updates are coming your way soon — including product specifications, end user scenarios, and developer documentation. We appreciate your support, as we build the experience layer of Web 3.0!

Join our Telegram group and announcement channel, and star Cardstack on GitHub to follow updates on the Cardstack framework, Gitchain, and a suite of standard cards.