Truffle: Ethereum Dapp Development Framework

by xwvvvvwx • 9 years ago

145 54 9 years ago

I recently got pretty pumped about exploring developing for the Ethereum network and spent an entire weekend reading everything I could about the protocol, the development ecosystem, language and anything else I could find - blog posts, tutorials, experiences from other developers.

I came away with my initial enthusiasm completely dashed. I can't for the life of me imagine why any sane developer would ever want to work within the constraints of Ethereum. It just doesn't seem to me anywhere near ready for any kind of serious development, or even trivial development for that matter.

I'd love to hear rebuttals to this. Is anyone out there doing anything interesting with this platform?

tejaswiy• 9 years ago

I generally agree with you, but would like to know about your specific concerns, what did you dislike about it?

utnick• 9 years ago

Here were mine Here were a few of mine, I’ve tried to get into ethereum a couple times

- installing mist and getting it to sync is very difficult and time consuming

- connecting to a testnet and getting ether on the testnet is also very difficult

- most ‘cool’ dapp ideas rely on oracles to publish data about the real world into the block chain. When you dive into it you realize that such an Oracle would be very very expensive to run for even trivial usecases.

malux85• 9 years ago

I’m a pretty experienced solidly / ethereum developer, and a developer with 13 years experience in vast array of systems and languages (from embedded C on ppc to high performance c++ and now deep learning and scientific computing in python). I completely agree with you, that there’s some very odd language choices in solidity, seemingly rookie mistakes, and the tooling is very poor. But! It’s the 1.0 of crypto. Early C stuff was poor, early html development was poor, early OpenGL development was poor, it’s just new.

I see it as a lot of room for opportunity, but I could also see how it could be frustrating to some more senior people - but I have found part of growing old and seeing things constantly get re-invented but slightly different are windows of opportunity - so I get excited

stevehawk• 9 years ago

early html development was poor,

what you got against <blink>?

nikkwong• 9 years ago

Could you touch on what you find are the short comings of solidity?

quickthrower22• 9 years ago

There was a semi-joke post on HN a while back where someone created a 'pyramid' lispy language using Racket, which complied to solidity.

But in seriousness, a Haskell -> solidity compiler, might make it bearable.

thisisit4• 9 years ago

But! It’s the 1.0 of crypto.

What will(is) the crypto 2.0 ?

yekm• 9 years ago

What do you think about other blockchain related projects, like exonum or eos?

patrickaljord• 9 years ago

What do you think of viper?

DeadReckoning• 9 years ago

I feel the same way. I find it hard to get started even with truffle. I wish there were more blog posts and examples

emerged• 9 years ago

I had the exact same experience, joined a project which was relying upon Ethereum. Spent several days learning everything about it and messing with the technology. Every moment the interest slowly waned as frustration upon frustration added up into a realization that this tech is nowhere near ready to base huge important projects off of it.

jaaames• 9 years ago

Glad I'm not insane, spent a long haul flight digging into Solidity docs and truffle and it seemed like a minefield of trouble to build crippled applications.

nowarninglabel• 9 years ago

Heh, you think that now, was trying almost two years ago and it was rather arduous. It's improved some though not by a ton.

Gargoyle• 9 years ago

I've only tried some small things with it, but ever understanding what it was trying to do two years ago was a major challenge. Not Urbit-level esoteric, but in the same realm.

At least now it's more or less coherent with some good intros and good tutorials.

One thing I do like is having a meaningful incentive to be efficient. Kinda like my earliest days fiddling with assembler as a kid.

westoque• 9 years ago

I believe a huge barrier to entry is the lack of accurate, concise documentation.

I did my fair share of solidity development myself and it was hard for me to find references on simple basic development on the platform. Diff ways to setup, diff sandboxes, no proper introduction of the tools, etc.

timothyjcoulter• 9 years ago

What's your take on these? http://truffleframework.com/docs/

guiomie2• 9 years ago

I had so much issue also. Getting unit tests working with Truffle was a real pain. There is a serious lack of good, concise and clear documentation.

smuemd• 9 years ago

You have to conceptualise ethereum as a market communication bus to exchange business information between autonomously acting market partners. Nothing more nothing less.

Smart contracts encapsulate market logic, i. e. the stuff where market partners have a need to verify that the information (or value) shared was/is processed exactly as specified.

The key insight is to limit your utilisation of smart contracts to this type of application. You want to keep your smart contract super simple and focused on doing only one thing. Also note that marktet logic is almost always just a tiny fraction of the overall business logic of whatever you are building. So there will always be this other place where you develop the rest of your app with more traditional means (e. g. Javascript)

To integrate the blockchain powered market communication bit into your app, you simply wrap your deployed smart contracts into a software wallet such as ethters.js. This makes the solidity methods available in you application as simple js functions via dot notation for example.

Here is an implementation of this: https://github.com/energychain/StromDAO-BusinessObject

you can just `require` the business object in you app and have access to 30 or so smart contracts that fire into a PoA blockchain network called Fury. Its actually quite simple. Take a look at the tests in the github repository. You can even trigger smart contract factories to mint your own preconfigured contracts if need be.

Here is an other example. A subset of the same smart-contracts but implemented withing a command line tool:

https://github.com/energychain/BusinessObject-MeterPointOper...

What you end up with then is a rather traditional app that 'composes' smart contracts to read and write stuff into/out of a blockhain network where appropriate.

skilesare• 9 years ago

Ethereum is limited. If you ran into limits with solidity then you ran up against the limits of Blockchain tech as we enter 2018. Use those limits as programming puzzles and go create something great. I find the limitations make me more creative. Solidity has some funkyness and that will get resolved, but there is still a ton you can do with it.

impostervt• 9 years ago

Anyone who is interested in getting started in Ethereum coding may want to start with this:

https://cryptozombies.io/

kanwisher• 9 years ago

Thanks for the mention. One of the devs here, if anyone has questions on getting started on Solidity ask here

QML• 9 years ago

Do you know if there’s anyway to create integration tests via Solidity / without learning JavaScript?

haldora• 9 years ago

You can use web3.py (https://github.com/ethereum/web3.py) to interact with Solidity contracts using Python. I'm looking into using it instead of truffle/web3.js so I can stick with a Python stack.

GeoffreySteven• 9 years ago

It is a great framework to develop on, but we had some challenges using MetaMask with it. Lots of room for growth, has serious potential.

webjunkie01• 9 years ago

I also tried to develop with Truffle but after a few hours I decided to avoid it and really start learning all the internals without a framework. To this day I haven't had the need to use Truffle at all to develop the majority of my projects.

guiomie2• 9 years ago

How do you do unit testing?

coolspot2• 9 years ago

I tried truffle for one project, but found Embark [777] more flexible and better designed.

[777] https://github.com/iurimatias/embark-framework

xwvvvvwx• 9 years ago

What did you like better about embark?

coolspot2• 9 years ago

* plugin system

* console & web console

* dealing with testrpc and tests is much easier in embark

* better documented and more configurable

* embark CLI more powerful and has help, while truffle almost doesn’t

* truffle has so many trivial bugs that are unresolved for months, usually no even word in reply from developers. Embark developers seem to fix bugs faster.

* integration with IPFS, Whisper OOB.

* probably forgot something else important. Overall experience is so much better with Embark.

akerro• 9 years ago

Another confusing name, it has nothing to do with Truffle - part of Graal Java compiler... https://github.com/graalvm/graal/tree/master/truffle

It's not as bad as "Riot" (at least 3 projects with this name), but seriously, are we running out of words to name projects?

jamespitts• 9 years ago

Swarm is another overly-common one :)

But really, what does any brand name have to do with what its product actually does? Microsoft might be the most important exception LOL.

net4all• 9 years ago

Do people not Google their potential names or what?

toomanybeersies• 9 years ago

Apparently not.

Jade/Pug comes to mind. Pug (the HTML templating language) was originally called Jade.

Jade is already a programming language (well, whole environment) made by Jade Software in New Zealand. They literally took the name of another programming language.

moondowner• 9 years ago

Yeah... I thought this would be something about Graal/Truffle and Ethereum...

Truffle: Ethereum Dapp Development Framework

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