It’s been almost a year since we officially started working on “eris”, and we are (finally) ready to move a product we are proud to call “eris” into beta.
As of today, version 0.10 of the eris platform is released. Parts of the 0.10 release series have been released (which I mean on stable master branches of the requisite repositories) for a while now. But as of today the centerpiece of the platform going forward, a cli tool we call eris is “released”.
The 0.10 release of eris represents a significant step forward for our work. After our 0.9 release we understood that we needed to completely redesign how the platform operated. Some of the reasons for why this was necessary are included in the platform’s Readme in the Background Section. Other reasons for why this was necessary were included in a blog post about our deprecation warnings.
There are a few portions of this release which I would like to highlight.
First, we no longer make an eris blockchain – permissioned or unpermissioned. We are, however, actively supporting the Tendermint open source project where our permissioned smart contract network efforts have continued. At this point “building on eris” does not imply that a developer is building on a specific blockchain and “eris dapps” do not imply that the smart contract network involved be built by any one particular project. In other words, we have gone fully blockchain agnostic.
Eris sits at a layer in the stack between a blockchain client and the operating system. In other words, eris is an application platform it is not a blockchain client.
Second, we have gone “all in” on Docker. While some folks have mixed feelings about docker, and while there are still edge cases, it empowers a significant advancement for application developers due to its “build once, run the exact same anywhere” design structure. One of our alpha testers said about eris, “Got a BTC node and an Ethereum node running. Even with the little fiddling, that was FAST!” We would not be able to do this without Docker.
With eris, developers and users can simply and easily build and operate smart contract and blockchain backed applications.
Eris makes it easy to:
- run nodes for established blockchains
- run middleware which hooks into established blockchins
- instantiate new (permissioned) blockchains
- build, test, and deploy smart contract packages
-
build, test, and deploy dapps based on the following frameworks:
- pyepm
- embark
- eris-pm (EPM)
- simple gulp based dapps
- work easily with IPFS
We encourage you to take a look at the very new and very improved eris! Eris might not be exactly what you thought it was.