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Daml Developer Monthly - January 2021

What's New

The results of the third community recognition ceremony are in. Congratulations to Emil and Matt for winning and thank you both for your excellent contributions to our community.

Daml’s default branch name is changing from master to main to have more inclusive naming. Read more about the steps and the reasoning behind it here.

Happy 5 year anniversary to Hyperledger!  We’re proud to be a member and look forward to what the next 5 years will bring!

And we've got a new name for the community update, one that we feel better reflects our goals with these posts which is to highlight Daml developers and the ecosystem around them.

Upcoming Events

Andreas and the gang will be at POPL 2021’s Certified Programs and Proofs conference next week (and presenting next Tuesday the 19th). If you’re interested in practical and theoretical topics around formal verification and certification you should definitely check it out.

Anthony will be showing off Daml’s write-once deploy-anywhere ability at the next Hyperledger Tech Study circle this Friday the 15th where he will be deploying the same application to both Fabric 2.2 LTS and Sawtooth.

Anthony will also be presenting on Why Daml at Hyperledger NYC on January 26th at 12PM EST. Join to learn about Daml’s tech stack along with a live demonstration of Daml’s unique ability to be written once and deployed anywhere including Hyperledger Fabric and Sawtooth.

What We're Reading

György breaks down all the different mental model we have around “blockchains” and “smart contracts” in his latest post where he rightfully puts these terms in quotes because they've come to mean a lot of different things.

Richard's latest security and privacy news covers newly discovered malware involved in the Solarwinds fiasco, why Parler’s deleted data isn’t deleted, and the secret history of ZIPFolders among many other excellent stories.

Richard is also going to be turning these blog posts into podcasts so make sure to check them out when they're live on the forum!

György shows us how to be happy developers by building Daml frontends in Elm. 

Olusegun published his MSc FE paper on OTC swaps using Daml.

Community Feature and Bug Reports

As you'll see below we now have support for multi-party submissions, allowing for better role-based access that many in our community have asked for including Jean, Emil, and Zohar. So thanks everyone for pushing for this important and highly useful feature.

Big thanks to James and Luciano for tracking down a bug in our Bond Issuance refapp!

Other Fun

Congrats to György for becoming a EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum expert panel member! 

Bernhard's secret santa project is complete and some of us have already started receiving our gifts.

Daml Connect 1.9

Highlights

  • Multi-party submissions allow new forms of data sharing and use-cases including public reference data and better role-based access controls. 
  • Daml-LF 1.11 is now in Beta, bringing Choice Observers and Generic Maps.
  • Introduction of Ledger API version 1.8.

The full release notes and installation instructions for Daml Connect 1.9.0 can be found here.

Impact and Migration

  • Multi-party submissions add new optional fields to the Ledger API and some interface definitions in Java. If you compile your own gRPC service stubs, or maintain your own implementation of some of the provided Java interfaces, you may need to add the new fields or methods. Details under Multi-Party Submissions.
  • Daml-LF 1.11 will not be compatible with the deprecated Sandbox Classic’s default --contract-id-seeding=no mode. If you use Sandbox Classic, you will need to either switch to a different contract seeding mode, or pin Daml-LF to 1.8. Details under Daml-LF 1.11.
  • Daml’s main development branch has been renamed from master to main to be more inclusive. If you had a source code dependency on the repository you need to switch to the new branch.

What’s Next

  • The Trigger Service is getting ever more robust and is likely the next big feature to come to Daml Connect.
  • Improved exception handling in Daml didn’t make the cut for Daml-LF 1.11, but remains a high priority.
  • We have started work on a new features targeted at the Enterprise Edition of Daml Connect:
    • A profiler for Daml, helping developers write highly performant Daml code.
    • A mechanism to verify cryptographic signatures on commands submitted to the Ledger API, improving security in deployment topologies where the Ledger API is provided as a service.
    • Oracle DB support throughout the Daml Connect stack in addition to the current PostgreSQL support.

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