Today the Enterprise Alliance (EEA) released version three of their Client Specification a set of extensions to that will provide an ecosystem of interoperable Enterprise clients enabling permissioned blockchains, and private transactions, based on the widely-known technology stack.
And Register for the , May 16 from 9:00–10:00 a.m.
Consensys is proud to have contributed to the new version, in particular bringing their deployment experience to help continually improve the quality of the Enterprise ecosystem and help it meet the needs of many different users of private blockchains.
Why Open Source Standards Matter?
is one of the only blockchains based on a set of standards, not just a single software project. This means that you can change to a different client if you want to, without losing the and apps you already have. It also makes it possible to build an ecosystem of interoperable tools that work together on top of the , so as they develop you can swap to the ones that most suit you at any given time.
Likewise, Enterprise is based on standards rather than any single piece of software. The Client specification is at the core of this — multiple Enterprise clients are working together, with who describe their use cases, developing standards to meet the variety of requirements that different organizations have, to develop an interoperable ecosystem of tools from multiple vendors.
Just under a year ago, version 1 of the Client specification was released, and the EEA community has been working to continuously improve the specification with a new release about every six months. The process, based on modern Open Standards development, has shown that it works well enough to continue with this rhythm, enabling both quick fixes to be incorporated and allowing for longer-term work to be done carefully with the attention to detail that it merits.
What’s New in Client Specification Version 3?
Specification V3 Improves ’s Path to Global Interoperability Across Enterprise Clients to Support all Industries.
This specification introduces significant improvements in the permissioning mechanism, managing permission through contracts on the itself. By making it much simpler to implement in clients, and to understand, there is less chance of something going wrong. Importantly, there is also more flexibility to build an Enterprise with permission managed in the way that suits what it is being used for, whether that is a globally distributed system for supply-chain verification across many large corporate participants or a small public library system.
An important step has also been taken with the of an agreed baseline consensus algorithm — the Clique Proof of Authority algorithm — to ensure blockchains can be set up now and be interoperable.
With this baseline in place, the EEA has started working on its interoperability testing program that will produce the information needed to keep improving interoperability between the tools that run Enterprise blockchains.
While Clique is appropriate for many use cases, the EEA community is also working on Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithms with a goal of developing one primarily based on IBFT (EIP-650) but enhancing the safety and performance for networks where BFT is a better choice. The results are expected to lead to at least one more consensus algorithm being adopted as a common baseline that all clients will implement, to be included in the version 4 spec release anticipated for October this year.
“By solving the universal and permissioning needs of its members, the EEA Enterprise Client Specification V3 serves as a critical framework to facilitate more valuable interactions, more efficiently, across organizational boundaries. The EEA’s Specification and ongoing standards work are critical to enabling entire sectors and industries to build shared collaborative infrastructure that will accelerate -based business applications from digital identities and supply chains to financial industry platforms, consumer financial services and beyond,” said Jeremy Millar, a founding EEA member and chief of staff, ConsenSys.
As with every version, there are general quality improvements like making terminology more consistent, incorporating the feedback of EEA’s hundreds of members to ensure that the requirements lead to clients that serve real customer needs, and a careful revision of the individual conformance rules to make sure they are clear and lead to implementations that interoperate, while keeping developers free to keep innovating the next generations of improvements and useful features for Enterprise .
Some of the work has been to more closely track the overall ecosystem, and to help improve the quality of the standards that it is built on. Building on top of a known technology stack and being careful to maintain as much compatibility as possible makes for robust implementations because there are fewer of the “gotchas” that can arise when developers have to learn an all-new approach. We recognize the significant contributions of the wider community who work on , and seek to collaborate as much as possible rather than promoting fragmentation that would force to choose one path or another with a large barrier to changing later.
We are also grateful to the whole EEA community, and of course, that includes many of our competitors, who are part of the standards effort to build an ecosystem that continues to grow and improve. We think it is critical for a piece of infrastructure that is critical to the long term of so many organizations that it is not owned or dominated by any single company.
This post was written by the Standards Circle
The EEA also announced the latest document, available for free, public download .
Published at Mon, 13 May 2019 17:41:12 +0000
