Ecosystem

BloxBean & Aion4j

The BloxBean project is directly aimed at providing Aion Virtual Machine (AVM) support for existing development tools and frameworks to achieve the following goals:

Help on-board non-blockchain developers to the smart contract world via straightforward development tools

Increase the productivity and confidence of smart contract developers

Leverage and integrate with existing and familiar development processes instead of introducing drastically different flows i.e. you can use established Java processes such as unit and integration testing, CI, CD, etc.

By supporting Java, AVM has already opened the possibilities of using established development tools in the Java ecosystem instead of re-inventing the wheel. In the first release, BloxBean consists of the Aion4j suite of tools:

While Aion4j Maven Plugin provides the command line development tools for AVM, Aion4j Idea Plugin makes those commands easy to use by integrating them directly inside of the development IDE.

Support for Maven

Maven is a popular build automation tool used primarily for Java projects.

Maven’s primary goal is to allow a developer to comprehend the complete state of a development effort in the shortest period of time. Most of the modern Java IDEs have in-built support for Maven. So a developer can use any Java IDE to work with a Maven-based project.

Aion4j Maven Plugin is a plugin which aims to provide end-to-end tooling support for smart contract development in Java. These smart contracts are executed on AVM via both an embedded AVM and an AVM running in a remote Aion kernel.

Some of the key features supported by this plugin are :

> Maven based AVM project creation using maven archetype.

> Compile & Package

> Unit Test

> Deployment, test and debug on an embedded AVM during development

> Deployment and test on remote Aion Kernel or hosted service like Nodesmith

> Interact with Aion blockchain through maven commands(deploy, get balance, get receipt, call, contract transaction, transfer, get logs …)

> Client side transaction signing

> many more …

AVM Archetype

The AVM archetype is a template project that developers can build on top of when creating their own project. It comes with a HelloWorld.java contract and test. The goal is to provide a standard project structure which serves as a starting point for the new smart contract developer. The Aion4j Maven Plugin generates projects based on this template.

IDEA Plugin (IntelliJ Plugin)

Developers spend the majority of their development time within the IDE, making this tool a core piece of the end-to-end development lifecycle. Aion4j provides smart contract development support for JetBrain’s IntelliJ IDE, which is one of the most popular in the Java community.

To make a developer’s life simple, it provides an Embedded AVM execution environment inside the IDE, which allows the developer to deploy and test smart contracts throughout development. Apart from simply installing the plugin on from the IntelliJ IDEA marketplace, developers do not need to install/download any other software to write and test smart contract on an Embedded AVM.

Additionally, this plugin supports interacting with a remote Aion kernel straight from the IDE, so developers can deploy, test, and interact with their smart contracts without ever leaving their IDE during the entire smart contract development process. It also provides few editor level features such as “JCL whitelist check” where the editor warns the developer when trying to use restricted or non-allowed Java APIs in the smart contract code. Similarly, the “ABI type check” feature warns developers if any non-allowed data type is used as a parameter or return type in a callable method.

The Aion4j Maven Plugin does most of the heavy lifting of interactions with the blockchain and the Aion4j Idea Plugin makes those functionalities easily accessible from IDE. So try out these tools and we would love to hear your feedback and suggestions.

Also if you like building developer tools, you may want to contribute to these open-source projects and help in the adoption process.

This is just the beginning of the tooling story for AVM …

Helpful Resources:

Aion Virtual Machine (https://github.com/aionnetwork/AVM) Aion Docs: https://docs.aion.network/docs/maven-and-aion4j BloxBean Website (http://www.bloxbean.com/) Aion4j Maven Plugin (https://github.com/bloxbean/aion4j-maven-plugin) Aion4j Idea Plugin (https://github.com/bloxbean/aion4j-idea-plugin) Avm Archetype (https://github.com/bloxbean/avm-archetype)

Introducing Aion Surf: Aion Surf mining pool launched by August.

The team’s main focus when building Aion Surf was design. They wanted a simple, intuitive design that seasoned miners would enjoy, but that would also be appealing to new entrants. They also thought it was important for the front end of the site to be responsive so that miners could always log in and check their stats without compromising on the user experience.

The team decided that their pool will have no fees for the foreseeable future. They did this for a number of reasons. For one, when building the pool, they were in the midst of the crypto winter and thought that fees would discourage new miners from joining the pool.

The team also knows that they can’t operate a free pool indefinitely so they are exploring other alternatives to monetizing the pool such as premium services that will be paid. Their plan is to keep their fees at 0% for 2019, but if the market rebounds significantly, they may consider charging a small fee — to cover costs only, not turn a profit.

One of the things they noticed when exploring other pools was that the process of joining a pool could be smoother. As one of their goals is to be appealing to new miners, they wanted to make sure that the barrier to entry was as low as possible. A clean process to joining the pool was key to making that possible. So when a miner decides to join the pool, they’ll notice that it’s very different than any other pool. The team has built a script that’s executed entirely within your terminal and we provide straightforward step by step instructions so that even noobs will be able to start mining in minutes. As with everything they build, they will look to continuously improve the process to make it simple and quick.

Monster Chase (AR collectibles game dApp) released by Pocket network on Aion alongside their Core MVP. Monster Chase is an iOS game where players can walk around an AR world, dropping and catching various tokenized monsters. Each monster caught is represented by a non-fungible token on the AION platform that can be used and traded within the AION ecosystem. It’s like Crypto Kitties meets Pokemon GO.

Monster Chase — Mobile DApp for AION with Pocket — video.

Projects Building on Aion:

Fifth-9.com:

• SPRXS.io

• Digital Liquidity Factory

Centrys.io:

• THÉO (theoproject.io) (with Syná wallets)

• Agora (beta.agora.theoproject.io)

• Spiro (centrys.io/enterprise)

Community dApps:

• BondWithFriends.com

• AionRoulette

Ecosystem builders:

See also Aion Connect.