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Recap
In our previous article ( Review of Mainstream Adoption for Ethereum Blockchain Development), we discussed the adoption of Ethereum on the mainstream.
In this article, we learn about Ethereum tools and infrastructure.
Glancing over the Ethereum ecosystem
The biggest advantage the Ethereum community has is its large variety of DApp coding, testing, and deployment tools, which make it much easier to develop and run decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain.
Tools and infrastructure
The Ethereum ecosystem distinguishes itself from other blockchain ecosystems with a wealth of development and infrastructure tools. Those development tools make the developer’s life easier when it comes to developing sophisticated DApps. Infrastructure tools make it possible to deploy and run smart contracts on the decentralized network.
The following diagram shows a list of Ethereum DApp Software Development Life Cycle
(SDLC) tools. We covered many of these tools in the previous chapters:
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The following list further explains the tools:
- There are many popular IDEs available, and you can always choose something you are familiar with. Remix, Eth Fiddle, and Superblocks are the web IDEs that you can use with any browsers. The rest of the IDEs are popular plugins to different desktop IDEs. In our previous articles, we demonstrated how to use Remix to develop a smart contract.
- Common frameworks, usually offered as a Command Line Interface (CLI), allow you to quickly create, test, and deploy smart contracts. Popular ones include Truffle, Infura, Embark, and Waffle. ZeppelinOS provides a complete set of tools, too. We used the Truffle tool in our DApp examples in our earlier tutorials. By reading our earlier articles, you should feel comfortable about how to use Infura and ZeppelinOS.
- In terms of testing, you can use Ganache for local testing, or you can set up a private Ethereum network for testing your smart contract. Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon AWS allow you to set up cloud Ethereum networks too. We discussed private Ethereum networks in our previous series.
- We also looked at a couple of block explorer tools, which allow you to monitor the smart contracts that are deployed on an Ethereum network. We discussed these in our earlier articles.
Next Article
In our next article ( Review of Ethereum Tools and Frameworks), we discuss Ethereum tools and frameworks.
This article is written in collaboration with Brian Wu who is a leading author of “Learn Ethereum: Build your own decentralized applications with Ethereum and smart contracts” book. He has written 7 books on blockchain development.
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