Blog

By: Katelyn Baker, Head of Software Engineering How does one wrap up a year, summarizing 8760 hours in hopefully fewer words in a manner compelling to readers? If anyone has any bright ideas, please let me know. However, in the absence of talent, we must rely on perseverance, so let’s give it a good old ...

A journey into running Corda 5 on an Apple Silicon Mac or other ARM processor-based hosts Write Once, Run Anywhere A couple of months back, a brand new shiny ARM-based Apple Silicon Mac dropped onto my desk here at R3. Figuratively that is, first impressions were that it’s a little more “robust” than the previous ...

We are going to describe some of the lessons learned in Corda 5 CorDapp packaging since Dev Preview 1 last year. In the year since that release, we’ve tackled some interesting issues and developed solutions that will serve us well into the future. First, let’s do a recap of Corda 5 CorDapp packaging. Corda 5 ...

It will always be tempting for enterprise industry players to try to reshape the world of decentralized computing and distributed consensus in the image of their own priorities: central command and control, with everything legible and accountable from a single standpoint. I’ve seen these dynamics playing out in sales pitch after sales pitch, conference presentation after conference presentation. The tech isn’t terrible, and the incentives are understandable, but isn’t it all missing the point? Shouldn’t we stop and think about what we’re actually trying to build?

In recent years, event driven architectures backed by a fault-tolerant and highly-available message bus have become popular. They allow for systems to be designed to share loads across multiple workers, be more easily scaled to handle very large loads and in the event of failures, replay messages that were not completed by faulty processors. We at R3 wanted to harness the power of KAFKA for this very reason.

One of the key features of Corda 5 is high availability (HA). A highly available system is one which guarantees some level of uptime by being resilient to faults that may occur during operation. In order to achieve this, the system needs to provide redundancy. This article will explore what kind of high availability that Corda 5 provides in contrast to previous releases of Corda, and how this is implemented in the context of executing flows.

If you’ve been reading the recent Corda 5 blog posts, you will already know that the architecture of Corda is changing. This change requires a re-think about the features that we offer to CorDapp developers, which are collectively known as Corda Services.

Starting as a product manager, among the strange creatures encountered on your path are so-called “user stories”. These usually appear as one-liners on product requirement documents and look like this: “As a [User] I want to do [Something] in order to [Achieve some other thing].” A vast amount of literature on user stories, how to write them and why they are useful is widely available, so there is little value in digging into those details. However, I believe it’s important to go through the reasons that they are a good tool to manage product development, but also to point out where they fall short; at least, for some type of products.

A good user experience helps people to enjoy the product they’re using. If you think of some of your favourite products and apps, you’ll be able to spot things which make it enjoyable. It’s probably been designed with empathy, by people who not only craft the experience but deliberately participate in it. It will have ...

This blog post looks to dig into one of the foundations of the new Corda 5 architecture, Virtual Nodes, and highlights the real-world impact of this architectural change. Let us first use a graph to lay out exactly what we were seeking to address with this change and deliver in Corda 5. Firstly, we wanted ...