Blockchain Development on Hyperledger Fabric using Composer

Students will learn about 4 characteristics desired in a DLT technology geared towards adoption by businesses. By end of this lecture students will have a high level understanding of why Hyperledger Fabric is suitable for building DLT Business applications.

Covers the Hyperledger Fabric concept of:

• Assets
• Chaincode
• Ledger

In this lecture students will learn 

• the role of a node in Blockchain technologies. 
• how Hypreledger fabric nodes are different from the nodes in a public Blockchain network
• different types of nodes in HL Fabric
• what is channel & how it is used

Composer Framework provides a set of tools that make it easy for businesses to create Hyperledger Fabric applications. By the end of this lecture students will:

• understand the benefits of using composer
• tools offered by composer

Lecture covers the common installation issues.

Students will need a decent development machine for installing the tools used in this course. They are also expected to code Hyperledger Fabric Applications. This lecture provides information on:

1. Minimal configuration for the development machine
2. Machine/Configuration used for the development of the course material
3. Integrated Development Environment - Visual Studio Code

Walk through of instructions for the installation of the:

• Pre-Requisites for the composer tools
• Composer Tools
  • CLI
  • Yo Generator
  • REST Server

This exercise is to ensure that the Student's development machine has all the required composer tools installed on their machine.

The Fabric Runtime is available as Docker container images. Students MUST install appropriate version of Docker on their machine before proceeding any further.

Covers some of the common issues with Vagrant based setup.

Students can install Hyperledger dev environment natively or in a virtual machine. This lecture will help the student evaluate the options and make a decision on whether to install Hyperledger on

• their host machine
• or in a virtual machine

Explains how the setup will work

In this lecture students will learn how to :

1. Install VirtualBox Hypervisor
2. Install Vagrant
3. Execute the common Vagrant command

In this exercise students will try out some commands to become comfortable with Vagrant

Shows the steps students need to follow for the installation of the Hyperledger Tools on VM

Shows the steps students need to carry out for:

• Pulling the Docker images for fabric
• Creating the PeerAdminCard
• Validating composer tool
• Connecting from Docker client on host with Docker Daemon on VM

Lecture covers the common installation issues.

To install the Fabric tools on Windows/Mac OS Students will need to install the Curl tool on their development machines. This lecture will provide a walk through of instructions for installing Curl.

The Fabric tools use Bash scripts for starting/stopping the Fabric setup. On windows platform there is no in built support for executing the Bash scripts. Students will use the instructions in this lecture to install Cygwin that would provide the capability of executing Bash scripts on Windows machines

Students may use the Hyperledger Fabric Tools on Ubuntu. This lectures demonstrates the steps needed for installation of the Fabric tools on Amazon AWS Ubuntu/EC2 instance.

This lecture will demonstrate the steps that students need to take in order for setting up the fabric development environment on Mac OS.

By end of this lecture it is expected that students will be comfortable in setting up the development environment on their own Mac OS Machine

Walk through of the steps needed for installing Fabric Development environment on a Windows machine.

Using the instructions student should be able to:

1. Install the Fabric tools
2. Address known/common problems

In the last section(s) you student's installed a number of tools on their development machines. In this lecture students will get an overview of how the those tools will be used in the rest of this course.

In the last section I have given instructions for setting up the Fabric development environment. It is expected that students have used the instructions to setup their own machines. This lecture gives an overview of the Development environment topology that will be used in the rest of this course.

In this lecture students will learn about the scripts that they will use for:

• Launching the dev environment
• Stopping the dev environment
• Suspending & Restarting the dev environment

This exercise will familiarize the students with various dev tool scripts.

In this lecture students will learn how HL Fabric manages the persistence of transactions and state data for the assets.

This lecture  provides the walk through of the Peer and CouchDB setup

In this lecture students will learn 2 new concepts:

• Anchor Peers
• Endorsing Peers or Endorsers

Consensus is achieved in Hyperledger fabric DLT by way of the endorsements, so it is important for students to understand how it works.

Clients may be thought of as the front end applications with which participants interact. Client nodes initiate the transactions. The transaction initiated by the client goes through an endorsement process before it becomes part of the Blockchain data.

In this lecture students will get an overview of how the endorsement process work.

Orderer provides the communication backbone to the Hyperledger Fabric Blckchain. On this lecture students will learn about the role of the orderer and its implementation.

Hyperledger Fabric is a Permissioned DLT. Membership Service Provider is an abstract component that is responsible for providing the authentication and authorization service. In this lecture students will learn about the:

• Certiciation authorities
• Membership service providers

Walk through of the setup of the containers for the 

• Orderer
• CA Server

Provide a high level view of the chaincode:

• Structure
• Workflow
• Execution Runtime

This article contains answers to some Frequently Asked Questions

In this lecture students will get a walkthrough of the online Composer Playground.

To assist the developers with coding of Business Network Applications, Composer offers a generator that can generate the scaffolding for 

• Angular application
• Business Network Application
• Model

Composer tools and front end applications need access to the Business Network Application installed in the Fabric runtime. The configuration and credentials (certificate & keys) are managed by way of cards. In this lecture students will learn about participant roles and network cards.

Students will be using the Composer Command Line Interface tools for carrying out various development and network application development activities. In this lecture students will learn some of the common commands

This lecture demonstrates the use of the composer CLI command line tool for managing a business network application. Students will see the commands for administration in action as part of the walkthrough.

This is a practice exercise to ensure that student is able to use the composer tool commands to carry out development and administration activities.

In this lecture students will learn about the composer rest server tool. REST server front ends the Fabric Runtime to expose the various transactions. Front end or UI application connects to the REST server for invoking the transactions.

In the last students learned about the Composer REST server tool. In this lecture students will learn about certain aspects of REST server that may not be well suited for the application being developed.

Developers of fabric composer toolset suggest an architecture that uses the REST server for connecting to the Business Network Application. This lecture describes the architecture and then walks through the process of generating an Angular skeleton application

In this lecture students will learn about the various modules available in the composer SDK. They will also learn about the type of interfaces that are available. Intent is not to deep dive but give an idea.

This lecture talks about a fictitious airlines that will be used as a case study throughout this section to model a Business Network Application

In this lecture students will learn about the modeling language. Lecture will provide a walk through of how model application is created using the yo hyperledger composer generator. Lecture will cover the concept of Namespaces

Lecture covers the following modelling language keywords:

• asset
• Identified By
• enum
• default
• optional

Lecture describes the support for object orientation & covers the following modelling language keywords:

• abstract
• extends
• concept

Modeling language supports arrays. In this lecture, students will learn how to model arrays.

At the end of this lectures students will be able to explain:

1. How the asset data is persisted in registries
2. Concept of Relationship

Modeling language allows simple validations to be associated with the String & Number fields. Lecture teaches how to setup such field level validations

The Acme airline model built till now have an issue...this lecture explains the issue and the solution to the issue. At the end of this lecture, students need to implement the suggested solution.

All transactions need to be modeled in composer framework. This lecture explains how how to model, coding of the transaction functions is explained in the section on SDK/API

Exercise to be done by students

There are two types of queries that are supported by Composer

1. Named queries
2. Dynamic queries

This lecture covers the named queries.

This is an exercise that student are expected to do on their own.

In an earlier lecture students learned how the participant types (roles) are defined as part of the business model. In this lecture students will learn how instances of Participant types are associated with the identities created on Fabric.

Access control can be implemented in Composer framework in 2 ways:

1. Declarative
2. Coding

This lecture explains how the declarative control works for simple rules.

An exercise for creating a simple rule.

In the last lecture students learned about the Access Control Language and how it is used for creating simple rules. In this lecture students will learn about Complex rules.

Exercise requires students to define a complex rule.

Describes the issues and resolution for some of the common issues

In one of the previous lectures students learned about the Cards. In this lecture students will learn the API that can be used for managing the cards.

Admin connection API is used for establishing a administration connection to the Fabric. Functions available on Admin Connection object are used for managing the Business Network Application. In this lecture student will learn all of the functions available on Admin connection object.

Client applications connect to the Fabric/BNA by creating the Business Network Connection object. Functions exposed by the business connection is used for multiple types of interactions. In this lecture students will learn how to create an instance of the business network connection and use it for connecting to the BNA. The functions exposed by this business network connection are available in multiple lectures covered in this section.

Students will learn all the Classes needed for submitting a transaction to the Business Network Application.

Registries have been covered in details in earlier lectures. In this lectures students will learn about the Registry related classes/API.

This lecture covers the Resource Class & how instances of Resource class are created using factory class.

In this lecture students will learn how to execute Named queries and Dynamic queries from a client side Blockchain  application.

Lecture describes the mechanisms for subscribing to the events emitted by business network applications. Students will see the event subscription code in action:

• Client API
• Composer REST Server