Kadena.js: Developer Experience Update
On July 15th, I posted the first article on KadenaJS. Since then, we’ve started building the developer experience team and working on our TypeScript Monorepo and tooling for our development community.
We have been steadily growing an all-star team as our team needed to be up to par with our all-star core Haskellers at Kadena. We currently have a team of 7 developers working on dev experience, which will grow to 12 by the end of the year. Growing this team this fast already points out the importance of the developer experience for Kadena. There is a lot of great stuff coming to our ecosystem, so fasten your seatbelt because next year will be like “The Fast and the Furious — K-orbit” 🚀!!
KadenaJS
Today I can proudly say one of the best, if not the best, features we have delivered for our Frontend community so far has been released as of last week: The Release of @kadena/client! Albert did a fantastic job spearheading and writing up this feature!
While Albert was working on this excellent feature, the rest of the team focused
on migrating all pact-lang-api features into KadenaJS. In the upcoming month,
pact-lang-api will be deprecated as we will migrate all docs and tutorials to
the new KadenaJs repo. The UX of signing a transaction is a high priority in our
team. Therefore WalletConnect Sign v2.0 integration is soon to be finished and
will bring a better signing experience for wallets.
NPM
We also started publishing some libraries on npm, so we could start testing our new libraries. At the moment, we are in the phase where we would love the community to step in and start helping out by using these libraries and bringing them to a mature state. We are encouraging everyone to start using these and helping us build a better experience for all of us.
Marmalade
Another item we need to finish before the end of the year is some Marmalade best practices. We will start with creating tutorials for marmalade and explain all the possibilities.
KDA Command Line Tool
Once again, our Director of Engineering came through with a new tool for efficiently deploying contracts on multiple chains called KDA Command Line Tool.
It includes some of the following features :
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Generate keys
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Construct transactions across multiple chains using transaction templates
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Conveniently create transactions from personalized templates stored in a configurable public GitHub repo
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Sign transactions with both plain ED25519 key pairs or with Chainweaver-compatible HD keys
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Sign transactions using the Kadena wallet signing API
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Sign transactions with your local Chainweaver keys directly by entering your password
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Quickly test, send, and poll results on the blockchain for multiple transactions
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Other basic operations for interacting with nodes
This tool will probably be the groundwork for integrating KDA actions in IDEs (VSCode, IntelliJ).
If you would like to know more, check out this repo.
Spoiler alert!
And last but not least, I want to take this opportunity to give you all a minor spoiler. You know I mentioned an academy, right…..?
Yes, we are finally making significant steps for our developer experience, and as the team is almost complete, we can start working on all these new items so we can begin next year with a K-bang!!