Developing Applications

Let's build on what we learned about ledgers and smart contracts in the preceding chapter as we consider application design and development. In Chapter 6, Developing Smart Contracts, we saw that smart contracts were responsible for generating the multi-party transactions that describe a business object's life cycle. These transactions were captured on a distributed ledger, replicated across a set of organizations connected via a network channel, as shown in the following illustration.

Figure 7.1: Recalling the components of a solution that uses Hyperledger Fabric

We saw that a ledger has two major components. The most important was the blockchain because it held an immutable history of multi-party transactions. The valid transactions in a ledger contributed to the ledger's current value; and it was this current value that was most frequently used. This is because users are normally most interested in the current value of a business...