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In 2019, we will shift main support of our Virtual Machine to the Aion Virtual Machine (AVM). A Java VM that will unlock a new development environment and programming workflow for developers building on blockchain protocols. This shift requires a set of self-sustained tools and add-ons to popular Java development tools. If you like building developer tools and would like to get paid for your efforts, we’d like to bridge those two desires. ?

First off…

If you haven’t already, read the following posts about the Aion Virtual Machine (AVM). In them, we walk through why we see promise in the Java ecosystem for our Virtual Machine as well as what a smart contract in Java looks like.

The Java Development Workflow

Early on in this project, we found it was going to be important to understand how Java developers currently work. We didn’t want to force developers into adopting new workflows or do things that they’re not used to already doing. So we decided to focus on integrating blockchain development into existing Java workflows.

From this, we found that there were four logical groupings for development tasks:

From here, we isolated areas in the workflow (specifically development, testing, and deployment) that have blockchain tooling requirements where the developer is blocked as well as quality of life experiences that will make development easier.

The result was the following list of grants and bounties (all of which are now available).

Java Contract standards and templates

While we have been working internally on standard Java “smart contract standards and templates” we need help expanding the breadth of these to include other common patterns in blockchain application development.

Plugins for IDEs

Our research has highlighted IntelliJ and VScode as popular among Java developers, but we acknowledge that there are many more IDEs preferred by the community (apparently there’s a huge bunch of you that still use VIM). We need to build plugins that aid in syntax, linting (class library restrictions), debugging, local deployment/testing, and more. If you’d like to help get coverage on more IDEs, let us know.

Command Line Interaction

An easy way for devs to interact with their contracts through the command line. Specifically, compiling, testing, and deploying to the test-net.

Build Tool Integrations

Gradle, Maven and stand-alone utils.

Other misc workflow improvements

Are we missing something? Feel free to let us know what you’d like to build!

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