Author: Matt McKinney (ArcBlock Marketing & BD Director)

In our continued quest to make building DApps and blockchain-ready services easy we’ve been looking at different ways to help both ourselves and our users find ways to validate our services that include new technologies, various authentication requirements and use of new capabilities that users can leverage to interact with websites, apps and others. One of the biggest challenges today is that because we are very early in the blockchain adoption cycle it can be a time consuming process and expensive to test out new ideas or validate those ideas without writing a lot of code. By default, testing has costs in both time to write the tests and time to execute those tests.

It’s also important to also consider that many developers working in blockchain today are focused on how to make their app or service work and no matter how good a developer they are there are always bugs, or fixes that need to be implemented on an ongoing basis. Testing and QAing an app requires a different mindset and in most cases creates more expense and developer time needed to get a product to MVP or out the door.

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To help solve that problem, ArcBlock is launching our first developer focused test tool - DApps Workshop. The DApps Workshop is a low-cost, high value developer tool that helps you immediately test and validate the use of decentralized identity in a range of decentralized application scenarios. For example, how do we validate that a user can login to an app using a decentralized identity wallet securely? Or how can we test transfers of tokens and assets between different users or multi-party scenarios using decentralized identity? Or how can we test different hashes, digital signature algorithms or encryption levels for an app?

You can do all of these and more and all of these tests can be done without writing a single line of code. DApps Workshop gives developers and product managers a simple tool that allows them to build a POC and validate their specific scenario in just a few minutes. It is a low risk, low cost way to evaluate a POC including what happens when you make changes to your application.

Today, the DApps Workshop includes support for:

  • Trade-related transactions
  • Prebuilt workflows and process/rules for all supported Tx types including multi-transaction scenarios
  • DID-based authentication including identity Types, DSA (Digital Signature algorithm) algorithms and Hash functions
  • Configurable metadata
  • Defining required claims including profiles and agreements
  • ABT Wallet mobile authentication
  • new features being added every month

Now that we understand why we created the Workshop and what it’s for let’s take a look at how it works.

Starting DApps Workshop Getting started with DApps Workshop can be done in just a few steps. For reference, you can visit our docs, or just follow these steps:

  • Install Forge CLI - $ npm install -g @arcblock/forge-cli

install forge

forge install 2

  • Run command $ forge start

forge install 3

  • Run command $ forge workshop start

forge install 4

Now that you’ve got DApps Workshop running, you can follow the step-by-step directions here to setup your first applications and transactions including Tx types including TransferTx, ExchangeTx, UpdateAssetTx, Proof of Holding and more in less than 5-minutes.