Make a Blockchain Speak to You

The æternity Middleware puts blockchain data into context so you get the information you need

There are good technical reasons for blockchain protocols to leave bits of information stored in their granular way. Although a good source of immutable trustful data, only connecting the dots between all available information unleashes the full value of blockchains. Have your questions, the open-source æternity Middleware has the answers.

“What is the most popular token?”

“How many owners of this token are there, what are their balances and how did they change over the last blocks?”

“Tell me whenever something happens with regard to my oracle/account/contract!”

To keep the chain data of the æternity protocol concise, æternity would not store answers to the questions above. Projects requiring this information for their use cases though (especially in the De-Fi sector) have a tool at hand, that automatically gathers lots of important correlations between on-chain data to process it into an easily digestible form.

Introducing: The new æternity Middleware

You might have seen it in action already: It runs æternity’s Explorer under the hood.

It was developed with any kind of usage scenario in mind: You can spawn it up to visualize what is happening on your private network or follow along the progress of the æternity mainnet. And yes, you get both the back-end service as well as the beautifully designed web interface if you want to. And the next good news is: It’s open-source and very easy to set up. You can follow the steps in the Github Repository and always ask for help on the forum if you get stuck.

For Techies and End-Users alike

Using the Middleware, you can serve the purposes of several stakeholders of your projects alike: have people get visual feedback and allow for quick read-ups on important information, as well as gathering of huge chunks of complicated information for your project’s tech. The latter is supported by over 40 APIs serving different purposes (get a brief overview here and if anything important is missing, you are always welcome to express your requests on the forum. Besides querying APIs for required information you can also use web sockets to be notified about specific happenings in real-time. This means that you don’t have to pull the API constantly for updates with requests causing load on your service, but have all kinds of new information regarding your accounts, contracts or oracles pushed to you via the WebSocket. Think how your dapp’s UX will benefit from having an integrated querying/events notifications service, without the need of using third-party services often used to achieve performance and efficiency in dapps UX.

The Real Deal

Utilizing the Middleware for your project comes with low maintenance efforts: æternity uses the Middleware for its official block explorer you will automatically benefit from all patches, updates, and new features that get introduced to the Middleware.

In the same way that you have oracles, state channels, and the naming system seamlessly integrated into the protocol, you can also count on the advantages of the æternity Middleware out of the box.

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Original article:

https://blog.aeternity.com/make-a-blockchain-speak-to-you-3f3a566ca441