Blockchains are awesome, but developing dapps leaves a lot to be desired. I wanted to ease my pain with a language that was designed to make programmers happy.

ETH + Ruby = <3

The intent is not for this to be a one stop shop for all things Ethereum in Ruby. Rather this is meant to be json-rpc client for Ethereum. That's it. And other libraries can use this to build a dapp framework around it.

The secret sauce of this library is the usage of the speculation gem. speculation is a port of clojure.spec, which you can read more about here. w3 spec's out the Ethereum types. Giving type like safety to a dynamic programming language like Ruby! No more 'invalid args to Solidity' error messages and other nonsense.

There are other safety measures as well. This library ensures that getter methods should be called with 'eth_call' and setter methods should be called with 'eth_sendTransaction'.

Getters look like normal syntax:

simple_storage.get

Setters use the bang to emphasize changing state and that you are spending precious ETH!!!

simple_storage.set! 42, {"from" => accounts[0]}

Ensure you have ruby and bundle installed. It is recommended you install ruby with rvm.

Install bundler: gem install bundler

Clone this repo

cd w3
bundle install

Ensure you have a blockchain that you can connect to. An easy development one is ganache-cli npm install -g ganache-cli In a separate tab run ganache-cli

Then to run the tests you can do:

rspec --format doc

You can run an example by ensuring you are in the root('w3') directory

ruby examples/*example*.rb

After looking at other solutions I didn't feel like the other Ethereum libraries only did the job of web3. They either combined the roles of truffle or etherscan, which I didn't feel like was appropriate for the intent of this library.

This was a fun chance to learn the internals of an Ethereum client and how to format the transaction messages.

Wanted to be in full control of my vision for what developing dapps in Ruby could be like. The vision of this library incorporates my experiences working with different languages. I want the Rust community's emphasis on safety because the blockchain space is scary and mistakes cost money. I want Clojure's expressiveness and minimal reliance on objects or classes. I figured I could possibly get both by using the speculation gem.

Huge shout out to ethereum.rb for guidance and inspiration.

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Copyright 2018 Harley Swick

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