What Is Hyperledger Composer?
Let me explain Hyperledger Composer directly to you: it's a set of open-source tools that lets business owners, operators, and developers create blockchain applications and smart contracts to solve business problems or improve operational efficiencies. Think of it as a commercial example of blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS). This is one of several Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation, working with corporate members.
As of August 2019, the Hyperledger Composer project is deprecated, so while people still use it, the maintainers aren't adding new features or providing support. It's now combined into Hyperledger Fabric v1.4+.
Key Takeaways
Here's what you need to know: Hyperledger Composer is a business-focused toolset for building enterprise blockchain applications, part of the broader Hyperledger project. It was designed to help create open-source blockchain apps that encourage collaboration within organizations and across business networks. Development stopped in summer 2019, and it's now integrated into the more comprehensive Hyperledger Fabric platform.
Understanding Hyperledger Composer
Hyperledger Composer is built in JavaScript, a platform-independent language that supports built-in libraries and uses functions and scripts to make things more scalable and reusable. It's an application development framework that simplifies and speeds up creating blockchain apps on Hyperledger Fabric.
If you're a business person without technical knowledge, you can easily team up with a developer using Composer to build specific features. This includes defining business rules for processing blockchain transactions, specifying the assets exchanged in blockchain use cases, and setting controls for participants, their identities, roles, and access levels for different transactions.
As a developer, you can use Composer to build and configure the core parts of the blockchain, like the network's digital assets, transaction logic, participants, and access controls. It supports sharing, reusability, and scalability of components across organizations. You can generate the scripts and APIs needed for business implementation, and it handles use cases with real-time testing—even through the web-based Composer Playground, without needing local installations.
With Hyperledger Composer, you can create and run a sample blockchain network and assign restricted permissions to participants. For example, you could build a 'Perishable Goods Network' for trading items like fruits and vegetables, involving participants such as farmers, shippers, and importers. You'd define roles for each, set and execute agreement terms, track shipments, monitor goods status at various supply chain stages, and manage payments.
Special Considerations
Hyperledger Composer offers advantages like faster creation of blockchain apps in straightforward steps, smooth and low-cost modeling and testing where you can build, test, and deploy options to find the best fit, and reusability of existing apps and APIs to cut effort and costs.
The Business Network Archive is key to its architecture; it holds the core data and functionality of the business network, including the business model, transaction logic, and access controls. Composer Playground is the web-based interface for modeling business requirements and functions, doing functional testing, and even deployment testing on a live blockchain. There's also a LoopBack connector that supports various APIs and integration capabilities, making it easy for client applications and non-blockchain apps to interface with Hyperledger Composer.
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