​​Ethereum Development
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​​Developing with Ethereum requires a suite of new tools. This guide is a walkthrough of the developer tools available. 
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​​For those who are new to ethereum, check out this link to learn the basics.
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​​There are a few main steps to successfully build and interact with the ethereum network.

​​Development Frameworks

  • ​​Truffle Truffle is a development framework for Ethereum which makes it easy to deploy contracts to both public and private networks. Truffle provides a lot of additional development tools making it a good starting point for any decentralized application.

​​Connecting to Ethereum

​​To talk with the network, applications must connect through a node. There are multiple options to choose from.
  • ​​Infura Provides an easy to use API for developers to connect to the Ethereum network and IPFS.
  • ​​Parity A secure method to connect to the Ethereum network to develop smart contracts and decentralized applications
  • ​​Ganache Quickly fire up a personal Ethereum network to run tests, execute commands and inspect state.
  • ​​Geth A CLI tool for running a full Ethereum node in Go.

​​Writing Smart Contracts

​​Programmable smart contracts can be created on the network to run a wide variety of applications/services.
  • ​​Solidity - A high level language designed for implementing smart contracts on the Ethereum network
  • ​​Viper - An experimental programming language written in Python for writing smart contracts
  • ​​Remix - An online solidity code editor. Can compile and create contracts on the Ethereum network directly from the editor. 

​​Connecting Web Apps

​​Web apps need a way to connect with a node and with smart contracts.
  • ​​Web3 - A javascript API to allow decentralized applications to talk with a node. Maintained and managed by the core Ethereum project.
  • ​​Ethers - Complete Ethereum wallet implementation and utilities in JavaScript. A powerful library that abstracts away from some of the complexity in blockchain development.

​​Signing Transactions 

​​End users need a way to call and sign transactions
  • ​​Metamask - A browser extension that makes it easy for users to interact and sign transactions for decentralized applications.
  • ​​uPort  - A self sovereign identity platform. Can be used to securely collect information about our identity and sign transactions for applications that support it.
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