The Hyperledger Hyderabad Meetup has written a new chapter in the series of meetups we organize for our blockchain community. This time we put the focus on Digital Asset’s smart-contract language, DAML. And this was India’s first DAML meetup.
DAML, which is open-source, is designed for multi-party business processes and makes writing complex smart contract easy. After already adding compatibility with Hyperledger Sawtooth in April, Digital Asset’s have now announced its much-awaited platform support of Hyperledger Fabric and R3 Corda. DAML also transitioned from being a proprietary language to an open-source language earlier this year.
And as expected, the session drew quite a crowd, including developers from various IT giants including TCS, Deloitte, Capgemini, Microsoft, Eleven01 and many more.
The session was conducted by two esteemed experts from DAML itself – Talia Klein and Meetanshru Wadhwa.
Talia Klein is a product manager at Digital Asset, the leading provider of distributed ledger solutions and the creators of DAML, an intuitive smart contract modeling language. She leads cross-functional teams in designing elegant solutions for global institutions in order to solve for their most significant business challenges.
Meetanshru Wadhwa is the technical sales engineer for the Asia Pacific at Digital Asset and the technical lead for client projects in the region. As a DAML subject matter expert, Meetanshru heads client education and DAML training in APAC and helps clients understand the benefits of using DAML to fundamentally change the way distributed applications are built and deployed.
One language for multiple platforms
As you all know, the enterprise blockchain space is fairly nascent and highly competitive. There are multiple platforms and protocols, each with their own version of maximalists. Hyperledger alone has six distinct frameworks, each tailored to different needs, making necessary trade-offs to solve different problems. The field is rapidly evolving, and we are all learning from the contributions of others to better the industry as a whole. One thing all these platforms have in common: Their purpose is to execute multi-party business processes. The differences arise in how a given platform deals with data representation and privacy, transaction authorization, progressing the state of an agreement, and so on.
And so each platform has its own patterns for writing distributed ledger applications, typically in a general-purpose language such as Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Go, Python, and C++. The result of this is that developers must pick which framework they want to use and then develop their application specifically for that platform. Their application is now tightly coupled to the underlying architecture of that ledger and, if a better alternative arises for their needs, that likely results in a wholesale rewrite.
One of the primary goals of DAML is to decouple smart contracts, the business logic itself, from the ledger by defining an abstraction over implementation details such as data distribution, cryptography, notifications, and the underlying shared store. This provides a clean ledger model accessible via a well specified API. With a mapping between this abstraction layer and the specifics of a given platform, as BTP is developing for Hyperledger Sawtooth, DAML applications can be ported from platform to platform without complex rewrites.
Here are some testimonials from the attendees:
“It was great to meet Meetanshru and Talia in person, Being an early adopter to DAML it was an added advantage to get to know the future roadmap.” – Hargobind Gupta, Freelancer |Python Developer | Blockchain Developer
“Learning DAML is an advantage at this time. It improves the efficiency of code and makes the business soultin much easier. Thank you Hyperledger Hyderabad for giving a first-hand experience of DAML.” – Sai Akshay, IoT | Blockchain | IOTA | Techie
The session was very much welcomed by the developers as DAML adds a truly robust and enterprise-focused language set to many blockchain platforms including Hyperledger with multi-language support.
Kartikey is a co-organiser of the Hyperledger Hydrabad Meetup and works as Blockchain Engineer at Idealabs Futuretech Ventures and is a technical team member of TEDxHyderabad. You can reach out to me via Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
