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Exploring Kadena.js — Insights into the Kadena Developer’s Experience
6 minutes readkadenajsservices

Exploring Kadena.js — Insights into the Kadena Developer’s Experience

Hello Kadenians! If you’ve been following our recent updates (Kadena Q2 Newsletter, Kadena Campfire — Community Call with Randy & Anastasia), you’re already in the loop! Our Developer Experience team has expanded substantially over the past year. With our incredible team of talented developers, we’ve dedicated ourselves to an array of projects geared towards enriching our ecosystem and elevating your experience within it.

In this article, we’ll walk you through our collective journey within Kadena’s extensive open-source ecosystem. We’ll share insights and experiences from across our team who are actively engaged in different projects. Although we have numerous projects underway, this article will focus on Kadena Client, Chainweb Stream, Kadena Tools, and our new Kadena React UI Components.

Let’s dive right in!

The Kadena Client

The Kadena Client is our Javascript/Typescript library that enables users to interact effortlessly with the Kadena Blockchain. This is especially useful for managing accounts and transferring tokens.

Kadena Client 1.0 is our latest iteration of the JavaScript interface and is an extremely functional and composable API, allowing for increased flexibility and customization for builders and users. Notably, this release also includes WalletConnect as a signing method, based on KIP-0017.

You can learn more about the Kadena Client by checking the source code.

Make sure to check out how you can generate a typesafe client by using the @kadena/pactjs-cli that accompanies the @kadena/client.

Chainweb Stream

Chainweb Stream plays a crucial role in our ecosystem by providing real-time updates from the Chainweb API. It is instrumental in keeping our applications in sync with the blockchain, particularly for building dynamic applications.

Click here to learn how to integrate Chainweb Stream into your applications today!

Kadena Tools

We’ve been working on a Kadena Tools DApp, which allows users to interact in the Kadena blockchain through several features. This includes generating key pairs, checking for account balance, transferring tokens, the module explorer, managing accounts, and more.

This project is a work in progress, but if you want to learn more about it, feel free to check out the source code.

New Kadena Docs

The Kadena Documentation (Kadena Docs) will be a new resource designed to cover every facet of Kadena, from basic to advanced topics.

While our current docs include extensive content that might seem overwhelming at first glance, the new Kadena Docs will be meticulously organized, with comprehensive indexing to facilitate a smooth learning process. Whether we’re troubleshooting issues or exploring new features, we hope you will find the new Kadena Docs to be an indispensable resource for new and existing builders! We plan to release our docs around Q4 in 2024!

Be sure to follow our CXO, Randy Daal, on Twitter for exciting updates and sneak peeks!

Kadena 🤍 React — New React UI Component Library for Kadena

Over the past months, we’ve been working hard building our React UI component library. powered by Vanilla Extract. It is based on the unified design system for Kadena.

The UI component library is specifically created to align the UI of internal Kadena projects. It is also open-sourced and available to the public. From buttons to form elements to primitives to quickly building layouts and pages in no time, the React UI Components are designed to ensure that all applications maintain a uniform look and provide seamless functionality. The main goal of the React UI Components is to make building our internal interfaces effortless so that we can focus on adding unique features for apps on the Kadena blockchain.

In the future, we plan to build enhanced Kadena blockchain-specific components on top of our primitive UI components with an elevated, familiar user experience.

The UI component library is still being built, but if you’re curious, you can check out the UI component explorer and the source code.

Moving forward

Our journey in developing the Kadena ecosystem has been a collective one, enriched with unique insights and learning opportunities. We are incredibly proud of our team’s dedication and are also extraordinarily grateful for our community’s feedback and unwavering support. From Chainweb Stream to the React UI Components, each project reflects our commitment to providing an exceptional developer and user experience.

By sharing our insights, we hope to shed a bit more light on our journey building kadena.js. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just getting your feet wet in the world of Web3 development, we invite you to explore our open-source projects and discover the exciting world of Kadena.