The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network is growing relentlessly as far as infrastructure and development are concerned. So far the decentralized cryptocurrency has gained a lot of support from various exchanges and wallet providers, while other developers are building unique protocols around the BCH chain. On the development side of things there are three pretty useful tools programmers can use to contribute to the BCH environment — ‘Flowee’ the BCH API platform, ‘bitcoinj.cash’ a BCH javascript library, and the ‘Bitbox’ toolkit for bitcoin cash.
Also Read: Meet Memo: An On-Chain Social Network Built on Bitcoin Cash
Many people often wonder if there are any development APIs and toolkits created for the bitcoin cash network so they can help develop some neat platforms on the BCH chain. Right now there are three useful resources for developers who want to build with the bitcoin cash blockchain. The bitcoin cash community is a very open atmosphere with more than six development teams working on the protocol, and in just a few short months there has been a slew of neat apps released using the BCH chain. One particular project created by the former Bitcoin Classic developer, Tom Zander, wants to progress the growth of BCH development in an accelerated fashion.
Flowee the Easy to Use Development Hub and API for Bitcoin Cash
Flowee is a hub that can talk to the BCH network by utilizing an easy to understand application programming interface (API). Basically, Zander is building an axis that allows for communication between bitcoin cash data and applications.
“In the hub, we process all those bitcoin data structures and as such, this is the lowest level of the stack where end-user bitcoin applications make the top-level of the stack,” explains the introduction to Flowee concepts. “In the hub, a network-based API is made available which is made to enable fast processing of huge amounts of data in a bi-directional manner. A quick example is that a tool can connect to the Hub and subscribe to a specific bitcoin address — The connection stays open and when a payment comes in for that address the hub will send a notification to the user.”
Flowee components can also connect to each other, one of the future products is a “data warehouse”. This is typically a big SQL server that hosts an index of the block-data. For instance it can store all the transaction IDs linked to which block-height and index they were stored in. This actual transaction data can still be fetched from the Hub.
In addition to the data warehouse concept, Flowee could be used for a configuration app, API-As-A-Service (AaaS), a statistics module, transaction creation, and specialized transactions.
Bitbox a BCH-Centric Toolkit
Another interesting set of building blocks for bitcoin cash is, ‘Bitbox,’ a protocol that allows programmers to build new BCH apps in react, angular, nexjs and nodejs with single commands. Bitbox claims there are dozens of utility methods that can be used to create bitcoin cash applications. Developers can deploy any number of addresses, toggle them between cashaddr/base58 and public/privateWIF, and even create a custom mnemonic or HD derivation path in eight languages. Bitbox has become pretty popular since its release because the GUI lets anyone develop their own BCH blockchain where they can execute commands, and experiment with certain features of the chain’s operation. Since launching, the platform has been downloaded 10,000 times across 48 countries.
“The command line utility lets you quickly stub out an application with web bindings and tests as well as a console with the entire BCH RPC available,” explains the Bitbox creator.
Your own Bitcoin Cash blockchain to configure however you choose. This blockchain is created from scratch each time you start Bitbox. It doesn’t connect to the real network and only consists of transactions and blocks which you create locally so it’s quick and responsive. Execute commands from the command line and client/server.
Building Killer BCH Apps With Javascript
Last but not least is the ‘bitcoin.J.cash’ protocol; a Bitcoin Cash Java implementation forked from the developer Mike Hearn’s original ‘bitcoin.j’ repository for BTC. Lots of developers like Javascript implementations because programming is very user-friendly as the language is the most commonly used as a client-side scripting language. For instance, the bitcoin.j.cash codebase allows the code to be written in an HTML page and enables compatibility with a website interface.
“This project implements Bitcoin Cash signature algorithm. It is based on bitcoinj and forked from PR-1422,” explains library’s readme text.
Alongside this, it allows maintaining a wallet that can send and receive without the need for a full node implementation. Those who want to follow the bitcoin.j.cash development can join the mailing list and anyone can contribute or build applications with the BCH Java library.
Developing on Bitcoin Cash Without the Need for Closed Software
All of these protocols and toolkits are meant to accelerate the development and overall adoption of the Bitcoin Cash network worldwide. With the three resources mentioned above, BCH programmers won’t have to rely upon proprietary APIs or deal with closed software to create ‘killer apps.’ Flowee, bitcoin.j.cash, and Bitbox allow anyone with computer programming skills to build platforms that are compatible with different languages, codebases, and servers all while having the ability to communicate with the Bitcoin Cash network.
What do you think about these three bitcoin cash-based development tools and APIs? What types of programming toolkits do you use? Let us know what you think of this subject in the comments below.
Images via Shutterstock, Github, Flowee, and Bitbox.
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