From Concept to Production in under 10 minutes - Meet the DABL alpha

Project : DABL, a scalable backend for SaaS applications with a serverless experience. Using DABL means you will get to market faster with fewer engineers and a cleaner, composable architecture.

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DAML Driven Blog

DAML Driven

<p>Most developers know that it takes far too long to build meaningful applications. Engineering teams get buried by necessary – but ultimately un-differentiating – design decisions and foundation building. Things like architecture choices, API and services integration, and maintaining and operating their systems.&nbsp;</p>

<p><strong>Until now.</strong></p>
<p>Today, I’m thrilled to announce the alpha release of <a href="https://projectdabl.com/">project : DABL</a>, a scalable backend for SaaS applications with a serverless experience. Using DABL means you will get to market faster with fewer engineers and a cleaner, composable architecture.</p>
<p>Don’t believe us? The video below shows the combination of the power of <a href="https://daml.com/">DAML</a>, the open-source toolchain for distributed applications, and DABL to build and deploy a simple chat app from scratch in under 10 minutes:</p>
<div class="hs-responsive-embed-wrapper hs-responsive-embed" style="width: 100%; height: auto; position: relative; overflow: hidden; padding: 0; max-width: 560px; max-height: 315px; min-width: 256px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;">
<div class="hs-responsive-embed-inner-wrapper" style="position: relative; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; padding-bottom: 56.25%; margin: 0;"><iframe class="hs-responsive-embed-iframe" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border: none;" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" xml="lang" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ZR-55CHASRk" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" data-service="youtube"></iframe></div>
</div>
<h4><br>What you didn’t waste time on</h4>
<p>While only a simple example, notably absent from the demo were:</p>
<p>Managing Database Schema - Serialization - Importing Code Infrastructure - Permissioning - OS Interactions and Dependencies - Packaging - Docker - Deployment Pipelines - Hosting - API Design - API Documentation - Separate Layers for Roles - Separate Layers for User Management and Access Control - Setting up Kubernetes - Updating Kubernetes - Scaling Kubernetes - Snapshots - Backups - Restores - App Uptime - App Scaling - Server Updates - Log Management - Provisioning Servers - Privacy - Notifications - Certificates - Monitoring - Scheduling Updates - YAML - Resource Migration - Pod Balancing - Performance Engineering - Creating Test Infrastructure - Database Keys - Premature Architecture Optimizations - Token Management - Threads&nbsp;</p>
<p>DABL, and DAML, take care of all of this for you.</p>
<p>DAML takes care of abstracting away the complexities of all code that isn’t the logic of what your application does. Developers only write business flows and application behavior.</p>
<p>DABL completes this vision by abstracting away deployment, management, and scaling of distributed applications. It’s a production environment for SaaS applications that involve flows between multiple people, companies, and even markets. We created DABL to empower a wave of lean, innovative teams building apps across all sorts of industries.</p>
<h4><br>Who is using it today?</h4>
<p>Today, DABL comes out of private alpha and is available for anyone to try. There have been over 70 applications deployed to date by early alpha users, including:</p>
<h3>Startups</h3>
<p>The time it takes to go from concept to MvP can make or break a startup. We have been working closely with startups across a range of industries to see how DAML and DABL can help them get to market first and stay there.</p>
<p>And we do! Every time you click on a button in the DABL Console, you are interacting with our own DAML application that governs and drives the DABL service. DABL is written in DAML. Dogfooding ensures we are acutely aware of your journey to successful deployment and ongoing growth.&nbsp;</p>
<h3>Enterprise dev/test and PoCs</h3>
<p>Getting to production can be a long journey within an enterprise. DABL provides an environment to launch your application quickly, gain early traction, and win buy-in. Whether you are on an established team looking to validate the business value or a single contributor looking to make a splash, DABL helps you get to demonstrable value faster.</p>
<h3>The Barclays DerivHack</h3>
<p>Last year, Digital Asset won the best overall solution in a DerivHack, a hackathon by Barclays and the ISDA standards body for the derivatives market. Next week, we are providing DerivHack teams with DABL so they can simulate a common repository for derivatives and securities-based applications. You can watch Digital Asset’s webinars and sign up to participate in DerivHack <a href="https://hubs.ly/H0l2WLn0">here</a>.</p>
<h4><br>Build, deploy, and scale applications in days</h4>
<p>DABL is a great option for any developer looking to build a simpler, scalable backend for their SaaS application. Using DABL means you will get to market faster with fewer engineers and a simpler, cleaner application.</p>
<ul>
<li>Deploy your application backend in seconds</li>
<li>All application APIs are automatically generated</li>
<li>All user authentication and authorization policies are automatically generated</li>
<li>Integrate 3rd party services without custom API ‘glue code’&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Deploy on upload, automatically scale</strong> - DABL allows your application to grow without having to learn anything about infrastructure or modify your code.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Application APIs for free</strong> - Any application built with DAML automatically defines and creates the APIs for all functionality of the application. In DABL, this means connecting your UI or IOT device to your backend is trivially easy.</p>
<p><strong>Roles and access control for free</strong> - All application users can authenticate directly to the application APIs. All authorized data and actions are defined by the DAML application code. There is no need for complicated policy layers that need to be kept consistent and in sync with the underlying logic of the application –&nbsp;policies and rules are an inherent part of the application.</p>
<p><strong>Integrated services</strong> - Incorporate 3rd party APIs and services directly into the logic of your application. No additional architecture or components are necessary.</p>
<p>Want to manage your application in your own environment? All applications written for DABL are fully compatible with the DAML ledger model and so can also be deployed to any DAML-driven ledger in our <a href="https://blog.daml.com/daml-driven/quantum-daml-amazon-qldb-goes-ga">rapidly growing ecosystem</a>.</p>
<h4><br>What’s on the roadmap?</h4>
<p><strong>Growing set of integrations and connectors</strong> - We know your application doesn’t live on an island and we are working hard to build the infrastructure to help you connect to your favorite APIs and services.</p>
<p><strong>Off-the-shelf core libraries</strong> - Pull in code from the community and avoid reimplementing simple, common functionality. Widely used libraries save you time and give you confidence in the underlying design.</p>
<p><strong>Public roadmap</strong> - We push new features to prod almost every other day and are moving fast to build a better platform for your needs. See, comment, and vote on upcoming features at our <a href="https://trello.com/b/rOQZlBEC/dabl-public-roadmap">public roadmap</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<h4><br>How do I get started?</h4>
<ol>
<li>Create an account at <a href="https://projectdabl.com/">projectdabl.com</a></li>
<li>Download the <a href="https://daml.com/">DAML SDK</a></li>
<li>Check out the <a href="https://docs.projectdabl.com/">DABL docs</a> and <a href="https://github.com/digital-asset/ex-models">examples repo</a></li>
<li>Join the <a href="https://damldriven.slack.com/sso/saml/start">#project-dabl channel</a> on Slack for any questions!</li>
</ol>

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  <p>Most developers know that it takes far too long to build meaningful applications. Engineering teams get buried by necessary – but ultimately un-differentiating – design decisions and foundation building. Things like architecture choices, API and services integration, and maintaining and operating their systems.&nbsp;</p> 
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<p>Most developers know that it takes far too long to build meaningful applications. Engineering teams get buried by necessary – but ultimately un-differentiating – design decisions and foundation building. Things like architecture choices, API and services integration, and maintaining and operating their systems.&nbsp;</p>


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DLint : Expert help writing DAML

DLint analyzes your code while you’re typing it, looking for issues and making suggestions on how you might care to improve it. It’s highly configurable (you can turn warnings off and on with granular scope control).

DAML Engineering Blog

Engineering Notes

<p>For developers of all skill levels, it’s a constant challenge to keep in mind the myriad of ways the code we write could be better. For DAML developers it’s not different. We wish to produce programs that are elegant, efficient, readable by others ... the list goes on. With each PR, we look to our code reviewers to advise us on (at least) the most obvious improvements we could make. This is especially true for DAML newcomers.<br><br>One of our main goals with DAML is to make developers extremely productive, and to make it easy for them to build high quality and secure code. The faster a developer gets feedback, the more productive they are. Relying on code review has an unfavorable feedback latency and getting full value can be "hit and miss". Wouldn't it be ideal if, while programming, you had an expert at your shoulder offering advice? <br><br>With the linting features we are integrating into the DAML IDE, the developer gets that advice as they type. DLint analyzes your code while you’re typing it, looking for issues and making suggestions on how you might care to improve it. It’s highly configurable (you can turn warnings off and on with granular scope control). The suggestions are easy for programmers of all levels to understand and where it makes sense, provides suggested code. Taking advantage of it is very easy and its use improves code quality!<br><br>The image below shows DLint in action. The IDE is warning that it found a block of duplicated code (suggesting an improved version would “factor out” the common block into a function).</p>
<p><img src="https://hub.daml.com/hubfs/main.png" alt="main" width="1051" style="width: 1051px;">Here’s another example of the sort of thing it can do. Given this function,</p>
<p><img src="https://hub.daml.com/hubfs/negate.png" alt="negate" width="1083" style="width: 1083px;">DLint provides the following suggestion:</p>
<p><img src="https://hub.daml.com/hubfs/foldr.png" alt="foldr" width="1084" style="width: 1084px;"></p>
<p>The suggestion here is that we replace our multi-equation recursive function with a one line version using the idiomatic standard library function foldr. <span><br></span></p>
<p>This is an engineering note, so now let’s get a little into how it's implemented.</p>
<p>DLint is achieved by the adaption and integration of <a href="https://ndmitchell.com/">Neil Mitchell</a>'s celebrated HLint package. HLint is a venerable program with over 15+ years of active development and HLint's use by the Haskell community is ubiquitous. The integration is made possible by the fact that we wrote the DAML IDE in Haskell and that the DAML compiler <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQulFrOp0Rg">uses the GHC stack "under the hood"</a>.</p>
<p>We do a lot of cool open source work at DA. Part of getting this functionality into the IDE means submitting lots of updates to upstream <a href="https://github.com/ndmitchell/hlint">hlint</a> (to use the <a href="http://hackage.haskell.org/package/ghc-lib-parser">ghc-lib-parser</a> package). Also, check out the <a href="https://github.com/digital-asset/ghcide">ghcide project</a> where we're contributing parts of this technology to the Haskell community! DAML itself is completely open source <a href="https://github.com/digital-asset/daml">here</a>.</p>
<p>We are super proud of how the DAML IDE is coming along. Try the new DLint features for yourself! You can download the DAML SDK <a href="https://docs.daml.com/getting-started/installation.html">here</a> and <a href="https://github.com/shayne-fletcher-da/lint-demo">this git repository</a> will give you a quickstart exploring some of DLint’s capabilities.</p>

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  <p>For developers of all skill levels, it’s a constant challenge to keep in mind the myriad of ways the code we write could be better. For DAML developers it’s not different. We wish to produce programs that are elegant, efficient, readable by others ... the list goes on. With each PR, we look to our code reviewers to advise us on (at least) the most obvious improvements we could make. This is especially true for DAML newcomers.<br><br>One of our main goals with DAML is to make developers extremely productive, and to make it easy for them to build high quality and secure code. The faster a developer gets feedback, the more productive they are. Relying on code review has an unfavorable feedback latency and getting full value can be "hit and miss". Wouldn't it be ideal if, while programming, you had an expert at your shoulder offering advice? <br><br>With the linting features we are integrating into the DAML IDE, the developer gets that advice as they type. DLint analyzes your code while you’re typing it, looking for issues and making suggestions on how you might care to improve it. It’s highly configurable (you can turn warnings off and on with granular scope control). The suggestions are easy for programmers of all levels to understand and where it makes sense, provides suggested code. Taking advantage of it is very easy and its use improves code quality!<br><br>The image below shows DLint in action. The IDE is warning that it found a block of duplicated code (suggesting an improved version would “factor out” the common block into a function).</p> 
 </body>
</html>

<p>For developers of all skill levels, it’s a constant challenge to keep in mind the myriad of ways the code we write could be better. For DAML developers it’s not different. We wish to produce programs that are elegant, efficient, readable by others ... the list goes on. With each PR, we look to our code reviewers to advise us on (at least) the most obvious improvements we could make. This is especially true for DAML newcomers.<br><br>One of our main goals with DAML is to make developers extremely productive, and to make it easy for them to build high quality and secure code. The faster a developer gets feedback, the more productive they are. Relying on code review has an unfavorable feedback latency and getting full value can be "hit and miss". Wouldn't it be ideal if, while programming, you had an expert at your shoulder offering advice? <br><br>With the linting features we are integrating into the DAML IDE, the developer gets that advice as they type. DLint analyzes your code while you’re typing it, looking for issues and making suggestions on how you might care to improve it. It’s highly configurable (you can turn warnings off and on with granular scope control). The suggestions are easy for programmers of all levels to understand and where it makes sense, provides suggested code. Taking advantage of it is very easy and its use improves code quality!<br><br>The image below shows DLint in action. The IDE is warning that it found a block of duplicated code (suggesting an improved version would “factor out” the common block into a function).</p>


Release of DAML SDK v0.13.29

DAML SDK Release Notes

Release Notes

<h2>
<a id="user-content-json-api---experimental" class="anchor" href="#json-api---experimental" aria-hidden="true"><span aria-hidden="true" class="octicon octicon-link"></span></a>JSON API - Experimental</h2>
<ul>
<li>Returning archived and active/created contracts from <code>/command/exercise</code>
enpoint. See <a href="https://github.com/digital-asset/daml/issues/2925">issue #2925</a>.</li>
<li>Flattening the output of the <code>/contracts/search</code> endpoint.
The endpoint returns <code>ActiveContract</code> objects without <code>GetActiveContractsResponse</code> wrappers.
See <a href="https://github.com/digital-asset/daml/pull/2987">issue #2987</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h2>
<a id="user-content-sdk" class="anchor" href="#sdk" aria-hidden="true"><span aria-hidden="true" class="octicon octicon-link"></span></a>SDK</h2>
<ul>
<li>Bundle the <code>daml-trigger</code> package. Note, this package is experimental and will change.</li>
<li>Releases can now bundle additional libraries with the SDK in <code>$DAML_SDK/daml-libs</code>. You
can refer to them in your <code>daml.yaml</code> file by listing the package name without <code>.dar</code>
extension. See <a href="https://github.com/digital-asset/daml/issues/2979">issue #2979</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h2>
<a id="user-content-daml-studio" class="anchor" href="#daml-studio" aria-hidden="true"><span aria-hidden="true" class="octicon octicon-link"></span></a>DAML Studio</h2>
<ul>
<li>
<code>damlc ide</code> now also supports a <code>--target</code> option.
The easiest way to specify this is the <code>build-options</code> field in <code>daml.yaml</code>.</li>
<li>Fix a bug where the same module was imported twice
under different file paths caused module name
collisions. See <a href="https://github.com/digital-asset/daml/issues/3099">issue #3099</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h2>
<a id="user-content-ledger" class="anchor" href="#ledger" aria-hidden="true"><span aria-hidden="true" class="octicon octicon-link"></span></a>Ledger</h2>
<ul>
<li>Improve SQL backend performance by eliminating extra queries to the database.</li>
<li>Enhance logging to correlate log messages with the associated participant id in multi-participant node tests and environments</li>
<li>Ledger api server indexer closes akka system on shutdown.</li>
<li>The ledger api server now stores divulged, otherwise unknown contracts.</li>
</ul>
<h2>
<a id="user-content-daml-visualization" class="anchor" href="#daml-visualization" aria-hidden="true"><span aria-hidden="true" class="octicon octicon-link"></span></a>DAML Visualization</h2>
<ul>
<li>Adding <code>daml damlc visual-web</code> command. visual-command generates webpage with <a href="https://d3js.org" rel="nofollow">d3</a> network.</li>
</ul>
<h2>
<a id="user-content-daml-ledger-integration-kit" class="anchor" href="#daml-ledger-integration-kit" aria-hidden="true"><span aria-hidden="true" class="octicon octicon-link"></span></a>DAML Ledger Integration Kit</h2>
<ul>
<li>The transaction service is now fully tested.</li>
<li>The TTL for commands is now read from the configuration service.</li>
<li>The contract key tests now live under a single test suite and are multi-node aware.</li>
</ul>
<h2>
<a id="user-content-daml-compiler" class="anchor" href="#daml-compiler" aria-hidden="true"><span aria-hidden="true" class="octicon octicon-link"></span></a>DAML Compiler</h2>
<ul>
<li>Fix a problem where constraints of the form <code>Template (Foo t)</code> caused the compiler to suggest enabling the <code>UndecidableInstances</code> language extension.</li>
<li>Generic template instantiations like <code>template instance IouProposal = Proposal Iou</code> now generate a type synonym <code>type IouProposal = Proposal Iou</code> that can be used in DAML. Before, they generated a <code>newtype</code>, which cannot be used anymore.</li>
<li>Fixed a bug where <code>damlc build</code> sometimes did not find modules during typechecking
even if they were present during parallel compilations.</li>
</ul>
<h2>
<a id="user-content-security" class="anchor" href="#security" aria-hidden="true"><span aria-hidden="true" class="octicon octicon-link"></span></a>Security</h2>
<ul>
<li>Document how to verify the signature on release tarballs.</li>
</ul>


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