Building for Libra blockchain is now easy than ever

This is just the first step in the journey. Our goal is to make Libra easy and approachable by reducing network interfacing complexity and providing tools to enable developers to focus on building great products and services around Libra.

librabrowser.io has now been upgraded to support the latest changes on the Libra Testnet with a facelifted UI and a set of new robustness features.

Since the network is being reset once in a while and Libra’s codebase is changing rapidly with breaking changes, we’ve built the new block explorer to withstand these changes. Now, when the Testnet is down, all the data will still be approachable and up to date for offline browsing. Network resets will automatically be detected and transaction data will be updated accordingly. Libra block metadata transactions, which are the majority at the moment can be filtered to present only relevant transactions with actual value.

You can read more about the technical approach we took to accomplish this feature in the technical section below.

Our Libra RESTful API is a tool for developers to easily interface with the Libra network and build applications on top of it.

Our Blockchain API main features include:

We also provide a Testnet wallet API that allows:

Libra’s core codebase is changing every day. As a fast-growing product, new features and new concepts are presented. By this time of the code lifecycle, there is no standard for almost any structure, nor network protocols.

One possible solution is to follow the Libra-core codebase very closely and adapt to every change in the structure/protocol. This means that for every change one should read the commit details, understand if it breaks something, port the Rust code to the chosen language (JavaScript, Python, etc…), compile it and re-deploy the API.

We chose a different approach. As some of the structure/protocol details are “hidden” within the Rust code, why not wrap the entire Libra Rust client with an HTTP server layer and serve it as regular REST?

The basic assumption was that the libra-core client will be maintained as long as the Testnet code is evolving, and will be the best source of truth for how the blockchain data and protocol should be constructed and parsed.

For doing it, we must take the following under consideration:

After wrapping the core with an HTTP server, we consumed it in our Libra API service for indexing, wallet implementation and more complex queries that are not supported out of the box from the blockchain (validators/nodes) itself. Such queries may include a list of transactions for a given account, statistics of the blockchain, and any filtering related queries like a list of transactions between given dates, aggregation of amount for a list of transactions, etc.

In our next upcoming releases you will be able to:

And much more.

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