Documentation?

[mlamias]

Hello.

I am interested in this particular repository, but I can't seem to find any documentation on what the purpose of the blockchainTB repo is. I can infer from the repo's main readme https://github.com/CDCgov/blockchainTB that this was created for use by CDC programs to collaborate on public health surveillance related projects in support of the CDC Surveillance Strategy. However, there does not appear to be any specifics of exactly what this does, any functions or modules in the code, how to use it or execute the code. Is there documentation that appears somewhere? if so, could you provide a link to it?

Thank you!

[tomsavel]

Thank you for your note. 6 years ago, we used this as an exploratory project - to gain knowledge of blockchain development. Thus, the project was focused on gaining fundamental knowledge of blockchain from a general technology and applications development perspective.

• Focused on Ethereum as our blockchain protocol and the main goal was to build a simple demo application where data is read/write from the blockchain.
• We learned the fundamentals of Ethereum
• -Smart Contracts
• -Transactions
• -Consortiums
• -Consensus Algorithms
• -Nodes and node types
• We chose to learn Solidity for writing smart contracts as it was industry standard for developing smart contracts in Ethereum.
• Used the Truffle Suite, a suite of tools for blockchain development, to help accelerate smart contract development.
• Used Ganache, which is a part of the Truffle Suite, to spin up a local blockchain network to test deploy smart contracts
• Needed to research and understand the concept of Oracles. Oracles allow for external apps to interact with the blockchain.
• Learned the concept of Distributed Applications (DApps) and how they are architected.
• Learned Web3.js - a collection of libraries which allow you to interact with a local or remote ethereum node, using a HTTP, Websocket or IPC connections. We chose to use this library to make interacting with ethereum nodes much easier, in a language that we were familiar with.

Of course, after 6 years, this is quite outdated - but it helped us with our foundational knowledge. Again, it was an R&D project. Nothing is in production at this time. Thank you again for your question.