Have you kept your first step in the Ethereum/blockchain technology?
You might get excited to know about its various tools and technologies that are obtainable in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Even it is good that you are getting overwhelmed to know about its tools because having a general information and understanding of the Ethereum development ecosystem can save a lot of headaches when trying to build dapps.
To make it easy for you to learn about Ethereum and its tools, I have compiled a list of top 7 highly useful tools that you might come across often when building Ethereum app development and Ethereum transaction tracking.
Here’s a List of Top 7 Tools to Get You Started:
Parity is a highly popular implementation of the Ethereum protocol, which is written in the Rust programming language. Currently, it is maintained by a company called Parity Inc. and anyone can execute the client software and join the Ethereum network. In order to implement your own client, you can easily follow the specs on the yellow paper.
Solidity is another most well-known programming language that widely used to write about smart contracts to run on the Ethereum blockchain. Being a top-level language, it can be converted to EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) byte code.
It is quite same to the Java, where there are various JVM languages like Scala, JRuby, Groovy and Clojure obtainable. These compilations are generating byte code that runs on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine). You are also capable of developing a language like Solidity as long as you are following the specs and your language compiles down to the valid EVM byte code.
Web3.js is the Ethereum compatible JavaScript API that implements the Generic JSON RPC spec. Currently, it is obtainable on npm as a node module for component and browser as an embeddable js and meteor.js package.
It is the key connection between the Ethereum network and your dapp. This JavaScript library can be used to interact with a node and allows to develop web-based dapps. To use this library, you need to run a local Ethereum node to use this library.
When it comes to talking about the MetaMask, it is the main source that enables you to visit the distributed web of tomorrow in your browser today. It also allows users to run Ethereum dApps right in their browser without running a full Ethereum node.
It comprises a completely safe and secure identity vault, delivering a user interface to manage your identities on varied websites and sign blockchain transactions. Initially, it builds as a Chrome plugin, but later it has the plan to support Firefox and beyond.
Whisper is the most exciting technology in the world of Ethereum. To interact with one another, it is a communication protocol for Dapps. Some of the use cases of this technology are:
Dapps, which require to issue small amounts of information to each other and have the publication last some substantial amount of time. For instance, a currency exchange DApp may use it to record an offer to sell some currency at a particular rate on an exchange.
Are you looking forward to storing a patient record, a sale deed or any kind of big file that needs to be publicly timestamped? Swarm is a decentralized content storage and distribution service.
You can consider it as a CDN; however, instead of the whole CDN hosted on one company’s servers, it is distributed on computers across the internet. Just you are running an Ethereum node, you can run a swarm node to get connect to the swarm network.
ENS offers a completely safe and secure decentralized way to address resources both on and off the blockchain using simple, and easily readable names. For the Ethereum world, Ethereum Naming System is the DNS.
You can easily map any Ethereum contract or wallet address to a human readable name that is much similar to an IP address to a human readable name. It removes the need of copying and types long hexadecimal addresses.
