According to an update on the hyperledger website, Hyperledger Composer development will be slowed and ultimately ended. For those who are not familiar, Hyperledger Composer is an extensive, open development toolset and framework to make developing blockchain applications easier.
Here is an excerpt of the update:
However – we at IBM believe that there are some fundamental problems with the architecture and design of Composer, as it is today, that have made us reconsider our future direction and plans.
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Composer has been designed from the start to support multiple blockchain platforms, not just Fabric – but this design has come at a cost. This design has meant that there are two completely different programming models – the Fabric programming model (chaincode) and the Composer programming model (business networks). This has caused significant confusion to users, with them needing to make a “choice” between the two programming models, with very few similarities between the two. In this particular case choice has been a bad thing, with many users opting not to use the “optional” part past the initial exploration or POC stage.
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Finally, those of you that have used Composer will likely be fans of our simple, easy-to-use APIs (JavaScript and REST) for building applications that interact with a blockchain network. There is a lot of code behind the scenes to enable these APIs that doesn’t really belong in Composer. What we have ended up doing is glossing over the underlying, low-level Fabric APIs instead of pushing improvements directly into these Fabric APIs. Today it takes ~50 lines of code to submit a transaction using the Fabric APIs, whilst in Composer it takes ~5 lines of code, and that’s wrong – Composer’s value should not come from just making Fabric easier to use.
The development team ultimately wants to make Fabric easier to use, so that a separate tool (like Composer) isn’t necessary. And to clarify, Fabric development will not be slowed. But what about in the mean time? Here is a look at a few of the available tools to help make native Fabric development easier:
Convector: This is a tool that was released in July. it describes itself as, “the first Open Source development framework for JavaScript Smart Contract Systems.” It runs natively on Hyperledger Fabric.
Maejor: Not yet released.