Holochain Dev Tools Released

Two weeks ago we published Holochain Beta 0.1.0, an app-stable beta release, which is the next significant leap for Holochain development.

Today we’ve released a powerful bag of developer tools designed to make it easy to develop a wide variety of P2P apps. With Holochain at their core, these apps will have the capacity to scale up and deliver experiences similar to the Web2 paradigms we’re familiar with.

Remember when Rails came out with its scaffolding and what that did for building Web2 apps? It only took ten minutes to scaffold an app and have it running. The Holochain CLI scaffolding is just as powerful, but for the Web3 world.

Now that Holochain Beta 0.1.0 is fully functional and the multiple components and developer tools have been updated to this version, it is time to start building — easily and with confidence.

Install and try out the updated developer experience with our Quick Start Guide. And for the deep details check out the Holochain GitHub org.

The alpha releases of Holochain have seen a lot of API churn, with both our team and app devs constantly updating code. While this is great, because it’s been driven by the needs of real Holochain app (hApp) developers, it’s made things challenging for those same developers who often found themselves needing to rework their code instead of working on new features.

The entire Holochain 0.1.x release series will not have any breaking changes in the HDK and conductor APIs — only bug fixes and potentially new features. The database format and networking protocols may change between releases, but these will be handled automatically if users update their Launcher (see below).

Essentially this means that the hApp you write now will still work in half a year, no matter what 0.1.x Holochain version your hApp’s users have installed.

In addition to new tools, we are releasing a refreshed Dev Portal. One of the Holochain Foundation’s primary missions is to ensure that information about our technology is open and accessible. As the new Dev Portal comes online, we invite you to jump in and check out the new knowledge base.

To support your goal of rapidly prototyping, testing, maturing, and distributing your hApps, we’ve been working hard on a collection of tools. These are the kinds of tools you’d expect from a Web2 stack, and now Holochain’s peer-to-peer software stack has them too.  The key tools include:

• Holonix: A shell environment with all the tools you’ll need to develop hApps. Holonix has recently been retooled to better support macOS and Windows, and has gotten some improvements to dependency management along the way.

• Scaffolding: A new rapid application development CLI that lets you define your data schema and generate boilerplate code for the back end, UI (in four different JavaScript front-end flavors), and tests within minutes.

• Tryorama: A Node.js-based test framework with which you can write both unit tests and end-to-end multi-party tests.

• hc CLI tool: Bundles backend and UI code into one file for easy distribution, as well as launching a test net on your workstation.

• DevHub: A hApp for distributing hApp packages to people via the Holochain App Store.

• Launcher: An easy-to-use UI that lets people search for, install, and run hApps. With the Launcher release will come a couple demo productivity hApps, distributed via DevHub, that we’re already using to manage some of our internal work.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be dropping blogs detailing each of the new tools so you have clear guides on how to integrate them into your work.

In March we have a unique education opportunity for Rust devs to learn Holochain, led by the Co-founder of HackReactor. With a stable beta, now is the time to learn and grow with the ecosystem.

Holochain Beta 0.1.0 has been a huge leap forward for our team and community, and we appreciate your commitment to being on this journey with us. But this is just the start. To support our growing community, we are finishing an updated white paper and already working on a beta 0.2.0 with enhancements to network security and performance, along with any breaking API, SDK, or protocol changes that are discovered to be necessary or useful.

Beta 0.1.0 will be supported for the next six months, so whatever advancements come alongside it, we are providing a stable release and the opportunity to build in earnest. We are excited for what you will create.