This file provides an introduction to building applications on top of Arweave.
Two primary APIs exist for interacting with Arweave - Erlang callbacks and
an HTTP interface. You can find the files that implement these at adt_simple
and ar_http_iface.
To get started building Arweave ADT applications please clone this repository
and consider checking out the sample applications found in src/apps. These
sample applications provided a guide through the development of a
number of simple Arweave applications, from a basic monitoring app, to a
de-centralised microblogging service.
adt_simple provides an easy to use abstraction for building Arweave apps in
Erlang. The module provides a simple method (using a callback module) for
interacting with the Arweave.
All callback functions in the modules that use this system are optional. Unimplemented callbacks will be ignored.
Supported events and callbacks:
new_transaction Processes a new transaction that has been
submitted to the weave.
confirmed_transaction Processes new transactions that have been
accepted onto a block.
new_block Processes a new block that has been added
to the weave.
message Called when non-gossip messages are received
by the server.
Each callback can take two optional arguments: the gossip server state and an arbitrary application state term. The required inputs and outputs of these functions are defined in the following way:
callback(NewData) -> _
callback(AppState, NewData) -> NewAppState
callback(AppState, GossipState, NewData) -> {NewAppState, GossipState}
Each node in the network runs an HTTP server that can be interacted with via HTTP requests. The HTTP API exposes the following endpoints:
GET /block/hash/[hash_id] Returns a block by hash.
GET /block/height/[height] Returns a block by block height.
POST /block Adds a block passed in body.
POST /tx Adds a transaction passed in body.
For example a GET request to http://192.168.0.0/block/height where the body of the GET request is the block height will return that block in the form of a JSON object.
Similarly, you can use POST to send transactions and blocks to be added and use GET requests to to obtain peers, get a block by its height, hash or or simply obtain information about it. In this way, it is possible to perform many actions on the Arweave purely via platform agnostic HTTP.
Information (transactions, blocks) is always passed in the body of requests in a JSON object format.