æpps Summit 2019 in Depth: State of æternity’s Dev Tools

This third story from the æternity æpps Summit is an in depth look into the Summit activities that focus on the Developer Tools.

A significant part of the sessions during the Summit were dedicated to the tools which æternity has built to date, as well as plans for future updates. In attendance were developers from Hack.bg, Limechain, projects from the first Starfleet cohort, and of course many of the æternity SDKs, Middleware, and æpps developers.

There were a number of sessions dedicated specifically to providing feedback on the SDKs and the Middleware. Having developers who use the SDKs in their projects and the SDKs team in one place was incredibly productive. This shortened the feedback loop significantly and made it possible for the SDK/dev tools teams to proactively engage with their audience in real time.

Results

The results of these sessions were as follows.

SDKs

We were pleasantly surprised that developers reflected positively on the state of the SDKs functionality. There were no major gripes with what æternity had achieved in its SDK development up to that point. This is a significant accomplishment considering the relatively short time that the æternity Mainnet has been live.

The area of improvement most mentioned was the documentation of the SDKs – and æternity is working on it.

Documentation

Along with the dev tools sessions, documentation was a topic which took on its own trajectory/life. As a result of the documentation discussion, Pegah Ghojavand took on the lead of preparing and launching an æternity Documentation Hub, which will help developers navigate the pieces of documentation related to various aspects of the æternity project with ease. More details on this topic will be revealed soon.

Middleware

John Newby, who wrote the æternity Middleware, was actively collecting feedback on its functionality and features. The input he collected was all translated into GitHub issues in the Middleware repository and is actively being resolved there.

Tutorials

In addition to the documentation, Middleware, and SDKs, æternity also received input on the tutorials. It became apparent that there is a need to write more tutorials and we have published a number of these tutorials since then. You can also suggest improvements or ask questions directly in GitHub, where they are all published.

Forgae

The Forgae developer tool was also made available to developers for testing and feedback. Vladislav and Martin were at the Summit to walk people through the functionalities that the tool offers, and to understand how it can be improved. If you would like to to know more about Forgae or if you just want to try it, here is the npm link. You can also ask questions related to the Forgae tool directly in the Forum.

Components

Another session held at the æpps Summit was dedicated to aepp-components, hosted by Sadi Qevani. The scope of the discussion was on components’ usefulness, the direction of the project, and implementation of the functionality. Members from other æpps projects participated, providing feedback on the components library, paired with relevant real-world examples.

Community Projects

In addition to the tools mentioned above, æternity collected input on what tools could be useful to developers. These inputs were used to form a strategy on what community projects to support in the future. More on this soon.

Onto the Future

We are delighted to share this overview of the dev tools activities from the æpps Summit. Our next post will focus on the Starfleet project teams that were present at the Summit. As always, feel free to contact us through the Forum or directly on GitHub.

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