Project Development

Note

This is documentation addressing XBR project developers, not XBR application developers. For XBR application developer documentation, please see the other sections of this documentation.

We build on the following toolset:

  • Ganache, the personal blockchain

  • MetaMask, the dApps Ethereum bridge

  • Truffle, the Ethereum development framework

  • Remix IDE, the browser based Ethereum IDE

Contents:

Build, Test and Deploy

To syntax-check and lint the Solidity sources:

make lint

To build the XBR smart contracts and ABI files (./build/contracts/*.json) from the Solidity sources:

make compile

To run the unit tests on the XBR smart contracts (against the configured local ganache test blockchain):

make test

To compile and deploy the XBR smart contracts (to the configured local ganache test blockchain):

make deploy

To build the XBR client libraries for JavaScript and Python:

make build

To publish the XBR client libraries to:

Writing documentation

The XBR protocol is documented primarily directly within source code using the Natspec (Ethereum Natural Specification Format) and Sphinx is used to generate static HTML from the Solidity source code files.

The following sphinx Xref roles are available with the Solidity domain:

  • sol:contract

  • sol:lib

  • sol:interface

  • sol:svar

  • sol:cons

  • sol:func

  • sol:mod

  • sol:event

  • sol:struct

  • sol:enum

So referencing a Solidity contract, function or event works like this in Sphinx:

:sol:contract:`XBRToken`

:sol:func:`XBRNetwork.open_market`

:sol:event:`XBRPaymentChannel.Closing`

Code Style

visibility levels (public, private, external, internal) https://github.com/melonproject/oyente

https://medium.com/@ProtoFire_io/solhint-an-advanced-linter-for-ethereums-solidity-c6b155aced7b https://protofire.github.io/solhint/ https://github.com/protofire/solhint

// solhint-disable-line

Transactions and Calls

With non-constant function vote, you can only get the transaction hash back immediately because the transaction may never get mined. Or it could take several blocks as indicated by “Waiting for transaction to be mined…”

Return values can be used by other contracts, but Web3.js can only use events.

the return value could be helpful so that other contracts

https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/770 https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/3293 https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/q/765/42 https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JavaScript-API#contract-events