Ethereum Apps and Java

This repository contains a very simple setup to start developing Ethereum applications with Java. For accessing the Ethereum network from Java the web3j library is used.

Prerequsites

For the demo in this repository the following components are assumed to be correctly installed.

• Java 8
• Maven 3
• Git 1.8
• Docker 1.9

Building Local Ethereum Clients

This repository provides two alternatives to run a local Ethereum client.

• TestRPC
• Geth

For both clients a Dockerfile is provided to build corresponding images that can be executed locally and in offline mode.

This is very useful for development and testing of Blockchain applications locally and without any external dependencies like a working Wifi connection.

TestRPC Client

The TestRPC projects provides probably the fastest Ethereum client for testing and development of Ethereum applications. This makes the TestRPC client ideal for development and automated tests.

Start with building the TestRPC Docker image from this repository's main directory.

~/Web3jDemo
docker build -t ethereum_testrpc docker_testrpc

The above command will create a Docker image named ethereum_testrpc. Expect this process to take a couple of minutes.

The resulting Docker image can then be used to start a TestRPC client.

~/Web3jDemo
docker run -p 8545:8545 -d ethereum_testrpc

The TestRPC container comes with 10 accounts that have an initial balance of 100 Ethers.
All accounts are unlocked and can be used for Ether transfers.

There are a number of cases where the behavior of TestRPC differs from Geth, the official Ethereum client. It is therefore recommended to develop and test Ethereum application not only with TestRPC but also with Geth or other official implementations of the Ethereum specification.

Geth Client

Geth is the reference implementation for a full Ethereum node that is implemented in the programming language Go. The Docker image provided with this repository patches the original Geth sources to minimize the waiting times for mining new blocks. This is useful to reduce waiting times during the development of Ethereum applications.

Start with building the Geth Docker image from this repository's main directory.

~/Web3jDemo
docker build -t ethereum_geth docker_geth

The above command will create a Docker image named ethereum_geth. Expect this process to take a couple of minutes.

The resulting Docker image can then be used to start a local Geth client.

~/Web3jDemo
docker run -it -p 8545:8545 -d ethereum_geth

Using the default parameters provided in the Dockerfile the Geth client starts mining and building a fresh private and local blockchain. Based on the Dockerfile The Geth client has been set up to contain two initial accounts with the first account being unlocked and ready to send Ethers around as soon as the Geth client has accumulated Ethers from its mining process.

A running Geth container may also be used to work with Geth JavaScript console. To open a console in the running Geth container use the following Docker command.

~/Web3jDemo
docker exec -it <container-id> bash

Once in the console of the Geth container, access the running Geth node using /geth attach as shown below.

root@<container-id>:/# /geth attach
Welcome to the Geth JavaScript console!

instance: Geth/v1.5.9-stable-a07539fb/linux/go1.7.5
coinbase: 0x1002d4b236bf23eef87ff3d0b3beae7931753f79
at block: 2521 (Fri, 03 Mar 2017 15:51:07 UTC)
 datadir: /root/.ethereum
 modules: admin:1.0 debug:1.0 eth:1.0 miner:1.0 net:1.0 personal:1.0 rpc:1.0 txpool:1.0 web3:1.0

> eth.getBalance(eth.coinbase)
1.3259508e+22
> exit
root@<container-id>:/# exit
exit

Build the web3j Demo

After cloning this repository build the command line tool using Maven.

mvn clean package

The result of the Maven build is an executable JAR file.

Run the web3j Demo

Use the following command to run the web3j Hello World.

java -jar target/Web3jDemo-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar

The above command runs class HelloWorld with default parameters (Port=8545 and IP=localhost). Connecting to the Geth container the expected output of the command looks like this.

Connected to Geth/v1.5.9-stable-a07539fb/linux/go1.7.5
Account 0xbb96b808f69acff10dbafa1d550911a62389b418
Balance before Tx: 0
Balance after Tx: 0.123

In case you work with Windows expect the Docker container to use a virtual host under a separate IP address and not to run on localhost. The command docker-machine ls lists the running virtual boxes and their associated IP addresses. Running the demo application with a custom ip and a custom port then looks like the following command.

java -jar target/Web3jDemo-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar <docker-ip> <custom-port>