In this post we will get familiar with the architectural approaches that make blockchain application development almost like a walk in the park. We will address five simple, yet efficient software development approaches for blockchain applications. Each of them being supported with code samples and tutorials.

This is an introductory post, that will be followed by separate tutorials and workshops where we will build a fully working blockchain application.

Bootstrapping The Development Environment Setup

Before we jump into blockchain application development, we always need to have:

Our own chain running.

The knowledge to launch a local node.

Connect to some kind of public test blockchain network that is run and maintained by someone else and out of our control.

We all know the sysadmin magic that had to be done in order to get a blockchain node running in the past. As a consequence a lot of developers got turned away by the sheer complexity of the development environment setup or missing cryptographic libraries and implementations. Luckily for all of us, our HERO — The ARK Deployer came along. Delivering the promise of seamless and easily customizable blockchain deployment in three simple steps.

Everything we learned in the field (meetings with organizations, PoC projects implementations, hackathons and workshops) combined with our expert knowledge has guided us towards building a product to enable easy and simple deployment of your very own custom chain in a only a few minutes.

All ARK based bridgechains are accompanied with free and open-source SDK’s, that enable you to jump right into application development and leave the blockchain protocol and sysadmin details to be taken care of by our automation tools and SDK implementations in more than 12 programming languages. Feel free to join our friendly chat at https://ark.io/slack and ask for help and guidance in our #help channel.

ARK Logic: Blockchain Application Development Steps

With ARK’s modular core our distributed-servers/nodes running in the background translate into containers — where you can deploy your own blockchain based applications and you don’t need to worry about consensus protocol or peer-to-peer network mechanics — it’s a protocol thing, just like TCP/IP, well a lot more complex; but it’s there running in the background, delivering security, trust and immutability — delivering the promise of blockchain.

Distributed Blockchain Applications in General

From the start of my journey in the blockchain space, I always wanted to build complex applications on top on this excellent technology. One of ARKs’ promises was/is to deliver tools and best practices that will close this gap and make blockchain application development a breeze. One of our first team accomplishments towards this goal is ARK Logic working hand in hand with the ARK Deployer.

This gives us the power to create agnostic blockchain applications, that can be run within any blockchain based on ARK Core technology. By developing applications on our plug-able core technology developers can build blockchain agnostic applications, target bigger audiences and provide cross-chain compatible solutions.

This introduces and further strengthens the role of the ARK Ecosystem, by bringing in new interchain monetization services allowing businesses to fully exploit and research new crypto driven business models. Our blockchain application development approach is closing the gap between traditional development practices by bridging the concept of software libraries and blockchain development.

ARK Logic: Basic Overview of dapp Structure

This is how we see the distributed blockchain applications development and deployment on our core-technology stack: