EDALoCo: Enhancing the accessibility of blockchains through a low-code approach to the development of event-driven applications for smart contract management

• Jesús Rosa-Bilbao ^[1] ; Juan Boubeta-Puig ^[1] ; Adrian Rutle ^[2]
  1. [1] Universidad de Cádiz

     Universidad de Cádiz

     Cádiz, España

     
  2. [2] Western Norway University of Applied Sciences

     Western Norway University of Applied Sciences

     Noruega

     
• Localización: Actas de las XXVII Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos (JISBD 2023) / coord. por Amador Durán Toro , 2023
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Blockchain is a cutting-edge technology based on a distributed, secure and immutable ledger that facilitates the registration of transactions and the traceability of tangible and intangible assets without requiring central governance. The agreements between the nodes participating in a blockchain network are defined through smart contracts. However, the compilation, deployment, interaction and monitoring of these smart contracts is a barrier compromising the accessibility of blockchains by non-expert developers. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a low-code approach, called EDALoCo, that facilitates the development of event-driven applications for smart contract management. These applications make blockchain more accessible for software developers who are non-experts in this technology as these can be modeled through graphical flows, which specify the communications between data producers, data processors and data consumers. Specifically, we have enhanced the open-source Node-RED low-code platform with blockchain technology, giving support for the creation of user-friendly and lightweight event-driven applications that can compile and deploy smart contracts in a particular blockchain. Additionally, this platform extension allows users to interact with and monitor the smart contracts already deployed in a blockchain network, hiding the implementation details from non-experts in blockchain. This approach was successfully applied to a case study of COVID-19 vaccines to monitor and obtain the temperatures to which these vaccines are continuously exposed, to process them and then to store them in a blockchain network with the aim of making them immutable and traceable to any user. As a conclusion, our approach enables the integration of blockchain with the low-code paradigm, simplifying the development of lightweight event-driven applications for smart contract management. The approach comprises a novel open-source solution that makes data security, immutability and traceability more accessible to software developers who are non-blockchain experts.