Introduction to Hyperledger, composer & Fabric

4 5

By Kiran Chitrada Uncategorized September 17, 2018

The present-day technologies are under constant threat as the emerging technologies are intimidating to take over and in this context, one of most searched emerging technology buzzword since 2017 is Blockchain and it is envisaged that by 2030 the Blockchain’s business value would be more than $3.1 trillion according to Gartner.

From the nascent stage a few years back when people were just interested in the financial applications using Blockchain, it has evolved in developing use cases and Decentralised applications in use for various industries. Some of the most prominent industries where Blockchain would transform the way the business is done are shipping, logistics, insurance, banking, education, and even government’s institutions.

The Blockchain adoption is kicking in at quite a fast pace and almost 66% of the institutions in the world are having some or other idea of what Blockchain is.

The following graph depicts the Blockchain adoption worldwide. Though it is just 1% who already invested in or developed Blockchain applications but that’s going to be incremented at a very fast rate in days to come.

Assuming that the readers have the basic knowledge of Blockchain, if not you can refer to our previous article on Blockchain, now we will directly dive into the following topics in the series of blogs:

Introduction to Hyperledger, composer & Fabric
Setup local Development Environment
Developing a Business Network Archive
Testing BNA in Composer Playground
IBM Blockchain Platform
Setup in IBM Blockchain Platform
Deploying the BNA to IBM Blockchain Platform
Interacting the network Using Swagger APIs
Security of Hyperledger Fabric
Dapps with Hyperledger Composer & Fabric

… More to come

In this article, I would primarily be giving a high-level understanding of Hyperledger, Composer, and Fabric before we get into the technicalities/functionalities/implementation in the further blogs.

What is Hyperledger?

The Hyperledger is an incubator for the Blockchain technologies that promote advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration, hosted by the Linux Foundation which includes leaders from all the domains in business from finance, banking, supply chains, manufacturing, and Technology.

The Hyperledger incubates various Distributed Ledger Technology Frameworks like:

Hyperledger Burrow – Burrow is hosted by the Linux Foundation which operates as a permissioned Ethereum smart contract blockchain node and was designed by Monax. Intel is the sponsor for the project which is currently in the incubation stage.
Hyperledger Indy – Indy is a decentralized ledger for distributed identity management. It gives the identity owners independent control of the personal data and the relationship
Hyperledger Iroha – Iroha is hosted by the Linux Foundation and is a distributed-ledger platform created for financial and identity use cases like certificate authenticity and patents etc.
Hyperledger Sawtooth – Sawtooth is an open source blockchain platform proposed by Intel. It has a unique support for permissioned and permissionless infrastructure and can handle even very large network sizes.

The Hyperledger also includes various tools like:

Hyperledger Cello – Cello is used for creation and management of Blockchain Infrastructure.
Hyperledger Explorer – Explorer provides the visibility into operational Blockchain system.
Hyperledger Caliper – Caliper is a benchmark tool that is used to evaluate the performance of a Blockchain implementation
Hyperledger Quilt – Quilt aims to achieve the interoperability between different chains.

Hyperledger Composer

Hyperledger composer is Distributed ledger technology framework which is an open development toolset for developing the Blockchain applications easily. The hyperledger Composer is used to quickly model your current business network, containing your existing assets and the transactions related to them.

The setup of the Hyperledger composer would be detailed in the next blog, but for now, understand that hyperledger composer helps in integrating the Blockchain applications with the existing business.

The Hyperledger composer along with VSCode or Atom edition extensions helps in building the Business Network Application (BNA). The BNA consists of Model file, Access Control File, Logic File, and the Query File. The BNA file can be deployed either in the cloud (IBM Blockchain Platform) or local (Playground). This further can connect to the external applications with REST API generated by the composer-rest-server.

Hyperledger Fabric

Hyperledger Fabric is one of the blockchain projects within Hyperledger. It uses the distributed ledger technology framework and Smart contract engine for building scalable Business Blockchain applications. The fabric is intended for developing applications or solutions with a modular architecture and allows components, such as consensus and membership services, to be plug-and-play. Like other blockchain technologies, it has a ledger, uses smart contracts, and is a system by which participants manage their transactions.

In simple words, Fabric is a production-ready Blockchain Framework for building Business Blockchain Applications which has the infrastructure, application building blocks, practices and guidelines for creating Blockchain Applications.

The present-day problems and challenges with the Distributed Ledger Technology are Inconsistency, Confidentiality, Standardization, Interoperability, and Scalability. The Hyperledger Fabric addresses most of these challenges.

The USP of the Hyperledger Fabric is trust, transparency & accountability and these features can be established with the following characteristics: