Architecture of the trade solution
First, let's look at the architecture of the trade finance solution. In Figure 5.1, we can see that the blockchain network consists of two channels, Trade Channel and Shipping Channel, and that each of the channels hosts two contracts: the trade channel hosts Trade Contract and Letter of Credit Contract contracts, and the shipping channel hosts Export License Contract and Shipment Contract contracts. Each contract is designed for a specific business domain, controls the lifecycle of a specific asset type, and can be invoked only by authorized participant roles. For an illustration of the language capabilities and Fabric cross-channel interoperability, each channel hosts one contract implemented in Java and the other in Node.js (specifically in the TypeScript version of JavaScript). The channel configurations and setup procedures will be covered in Chapter 9, Network Operation and Distributed Application Building, following on from the procedure...