Decentralized Applications

The peer-to-peer (P2P, peer-to-peer) movement enables millions of Internet users to connect together. USENET, a distributed messaging system known as the first peer-to-peer architecture, was founded in 1979 as the successor to the first “Internet” ARPANET. ARPANET is a client-server network where participants run nodes to request and serve content, but due to the lack of the ability to provide any context beyond simple address-based routing, USENET is promising to implement a decentralized control model, i.e. client- The server model provides a self-organizing method for newsgroup servers from the perspective of users or clients, respectively. DApps Development Services

In 1999, the famous music and file sharing application Napster appeared. Napster was the beginning of the evolution of the peer-to-peer networking movement into BitTorrent, in which participating users established a virtual network, completely independent of the physical network, without complying with any governing bodies or restrictions.

Since peer-to-peer mechanisms can be used to access any type of distributed resource, they play a central role in decentralized applications.

What is a DApp?

Unlike traditional applications, Build Decentralized Apps(DApps) will not only belong to a single provider or server, but the entire stack will be deployed and operated in a distributed manner on the P2P network.

A typical DApp stack includes frontend, backend, and data storage. Creating a DApp has many advantages that typical centralized architectures cannot provide:

1) Elasticity: Writing business logic on smart contracts means that the DApp backend will be fully distributed and managed on the blockchain. Unlike deploying an application on a central server, a DApp has no downtime, it continues to exist as long as the blockchain is still running.

2) Transparency: The open source nature of DApps allows anyone to fork the code and run the same application on the blockchain. Likewise, any interaction with the blockchain is permanently stored and anyone with a copy of the blockchain can gain access to it. It’s worth noting that it may not be possible to decompile the bytecode to source code and fully understand the contract’s code. Developers seeking to provide full transparency of contract behavior must publish source code for users to read, compile, and verify.

3) Anti-censorship: As long as users have access to Ethereum nodes, users will always be able to interact with DApps without interference from centralized authority control. Once the code is deployed on the network, no service provider, not even the owner of the smart contract, can change the code.

Components of a DApp

Blockchain (Smart Contract)
Smart contracts are used to store the business logic, state, and computations of decentralized applications; think of smart contracts as server-side components in regular applications.

One advantage of deploying server-side logic on Ethereum smart contracts is that you can build a more complex architecture where smart contracts can read and write data to each other. After deploying a smart contract, your business logic can be used by many other developers in the future without requiring you to manage and maintain the code.

A major problem with running smart contracts as a core business logic function is the inability to change the code after it has been deployed. Also, a very large smart contract can take a lot of gas to deploy and run. Therefore, some applications may opt for offline computing and external data sources. Remember that the core business logic of a DApp relies on external data or servers which means your users must trust these external things.

Front End (Web User Interface (UI))

Unlike DApp’s business logic which requires developers to understand EVM and new languages ​​(such as Solidity), DApp’s client-side interface uses basic web front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). This allows traditional web developers to use the tools, libraries and frameworks they are familiar with. Interactions with DApps (such as signing messages, sending transactions, and key management) typically take place through the browser itself using tools such as the Mist browser or the Metamask browser extension.

While it is also possible to create mobile DApps, there is currently no best practice for creating mobile DApp frontends due to the lack of a mobile client that can be used as a light client with key management capabilities.

data storage

Smart contracts are currently not suitable for storing large amounts of data due to high gas costs. Therefore, most DApps will utilize decentralized storage such as IPFS or Swarm to store and distribute large static assets such as images, videos and client-side applications (HTML, CSS, JavaScript).

The hash of the content is usually stored as bytes in a smart contract using a key-value map. Then, retrieve the assets by calling the smart contract through your front-end application to get the URL of each asset.

Centralized data

A centralized database is a data store on a server whose characteristics are associated with descriptions. They use a client-server network architecture, which allows clients or users to modify data stored on centralized servers. Control of the database remains with the designated administrator, who authenticates the client’s credentials before providing access to the database. If the administrator’s security is compromised, the data can be changed or even deleted because the administrator is the only person responsible for managing the database.

DApp framework

There are many different development frameworks and libraries, written in multiple languages, DApps development company allowing developers to have a better experience when creating and deploying DApps.

Truffle

Truffle is a popular choice that provides Ethereum with a managed development environment, testing framework and asset pipeline.

With Truffle, you get:

Built-in smart contract compilation, linking, deployment and binary management.

🔸Automated contract testing with Mocha and Chai.

🔸Configurable build pipeline with support for custom build processes.

🔸Scriptable deployment and migration framework.

🔸For network management deployed to many public and private networks.

🔸An interactive console that communicates directly with the contract.

🔸Rebuild assets on the fly during development.

🔸An external script runner that executes scripts in the Truffle environment.