Building a complete blockchain application is an ambitious and challenging project, not just because of the range of skills it requires—systems, networking, security, and web application development, to name a few—but because it requires concerted development, testing, and deployment by multiple organizations spanning multiple security domains.
In this chapter, we began with a simple smart contract and ended with a four-peer blockchain network that was ready to drive trade scenarios and store records in a tamper-resistant, shared, replicated ledger. In the process, we learned how to design an organization structure and configure a Fabric network. We learned how to build a channel, or an instance of a Fabric blockchain, get peers in a network to join the channel, and install and instantiate a smart contract on that channel, using the Fabric SDK. We learned...