IOV Weave is a framework for quickly building your custom ABCI application to run a blockchain on top of the best-of-class BFT Proof-of-stake Tendermint consensus engine. It provides much commonly used functionality that can quickly be imported in your custom chain, as well as a simple framework for adding the custom functionality unique to your project.
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It is inspired by the routing and middleware model of many web application frameworks, and informed by years of wrestling with blockchain state machines. More directly, it is based on the official cosmos-sdk, both the 0.8 release as well as the future 0.9 rewrite. Naturally, as I was the main author of 0.8.
While both of those are extremely powerful and flexible and contain advanced features, they have a steep learning curve for novice users. Thus, this library aims to favor simplicity over power when there is a choice. If you hit limitations in the design of this library (such as maintaining multiple merkle stores in one app), I highly advise you to use the official cosmos sdk.
On the other hand, if you want to try out tendermint, or have a design that doesn't require an advanced setup, you should try this library and give feedback, especially on ease-of-use. The end goal is to make blockchain development almost as productive as web development (in golang), by providing defaults and best practices for many choices, while allowing extreme flexibility in business logic and data modelling.
For more details on the design goals, see the Design Document
First, make sure you have set up the requirements. If you have a solid go and node developer setup, you may skip this, but good to go through it to be sure.
Once you are set up, you should be able to run something
like the following to compile both bnsd (IOV blockchain application)
and bnscli (a client side app to interact with bnsd).
You will have to
install a compatible version of tendermint
separately. (Currently we use the v0.31.5 release).
# cd into to your workspace that is not in your $GOPATH
git clone https://github.com/iov-one/weave.git
cd weave
make install
Note that this app relies on a separate tendermint process to drive it. It is helpful to first read a primer on tendermint as well as the documentation on the tendermint cli commands.
Once it compiles, I highly suggest going through the readthedocs
Check out compatibility charts
We generate documentation from the *.proto files to keep it up to date.
You can view the documentation for all packages used in the bns app.
Or generate it yourself:
make protodocs
open ./docs/proto/index.htmlWhen opening a pull request with a change that does not require a CHANGELOG
entry, include !nochangelog in the description. This will inform our build
system to not fail the build due to a missing CHANGELOG update. This
instruction is needed only if you are changing any of the Go source files.
The original version, until v0.6.0 was released under
confio/weave. The original author, Ethan Frey, had
previously worked on the
Cosmos SDK
and wanted to make a simpler framework he could use to
start building demo apps, while the main sdk matured.
Thus, confio/weave was born the first few months of 2018.
This framework was designed to be open source and shared,
but the only real usage and development was by
IOV, so it was donated to
that organization in August 2018 to be developed further
for their BNS blockchain, as well as a companion to
iov-core
client libraries that deprecated confio/weave-js
Check out our latest audit report.
Thanks to newfinal100 for designing the weave logo.