News
What’s happening?
The first version of the peaq SDK (Software Development Kit) has been launched, making it easier for builders and founders to bring their project to peaq or create a new one from the ground up.
Why does this matter?
The SDK makes things simpler and faster for builders. From teams working on the peaq network itself to projects building on top of it, manufacturers looking to connect their devices off the shelf, and hobby-coders experimenting with peaq’s functions.
What does this mean for the community?
The SDK will speed up development time across the board, enabling projects building on peaq and migrating from other networks to move faster and bring more value to the ecosystem. This should speed up the rate at which projects can deploy on peaq, while attracting more projects to build on peaq.
More often than not, building a house out of LEGO takes a few hours of pure joy. Some tinkering with the parts, an excavation of that one tile that had to fall behind the sofa, and there we go, the last brick snaps into place with a satisfying click. Needless to say, building a real house to mimic the one made of LEGO would take a lot more time, and a ton more headache, and won’t be nearly as easy.
What does any of this have to do with the peaq Software Development Kit (SDK)? Well, it’s simple: With its release, founders and developers building on peaq as well as manufacturers bringing their devices to the network will find the experience to be a lot closer to building with LEGO. We are not promising an equally satisfying click, of course, but hey, at least you won’t have to dive under the sofa.
Let’s take a step back and quickly get the uninitiated up to speed on what a software development kit is. As its name suggests, an SDK is a kit of tools meant to make it easier for projects to write software on a specific network or for a device. It usually includes a set of libraries — collections of pre-written code that anyone can use — as well as documentation and, often, code samples.
The above summarizes peaq SDK quite nicely, but there is an important note to get out of the way. First, let’s quickly go over an image you’ve likely seen in our other blogs — peaq ecosystem’s architecture, a bird’s eye view, if birds could look at a tech stack. Who knows, maybe, it’s not electric sheep that androids should have dreamt of? But we digressed.
So here’s the thing: The upper layers here ^ , the ones that users interact with, like dApps, peaq console, peaq portal, are most often written in Javascript. Sure, there might be projects out there that prefer Python-based frameworks, but we most often see stuff in Javascript.
At the lower layers, where the magic happens behind the scenes, things are different. The peaq and krest networks are both built with the Substrate framework, where Rust is the work horse.
Sure, Substrate is an amazing framework for blockchain devs, and Rust is a powerful and versatile language. That said, it’s not Javascript, and those new to it may take some time to figure things out.
When developing the peaq SDK, the goal was simple: To make it easy for those building in Javascript, the world’s most widespread coding language, to work with all the Rust-based stuff. Effectively, it’s a shortcut that saves you the time and effort needed to make sense of things and go through some of the essential first steps in just a few lines of code.
This way, it enables anyone working pretty much on anything peaq-related to move faster, simplifying network migration for established projects, enabling new builders to build faster, and making it easier for device manufacturers to outfit their products with peaq IDs from the get-go.
This release version simplifies the first steps any builder would have to do to bring the dApp on peaq, whether part of an experienced crew or a lone enthusiast. Namely, connecting to the network and interacting with peaq IDs.
If you are a builder, you probably dived into the Docs entry for the SDK even before the LEGO part, but for everyone else — connecting to peaq normally takes installing several libraries and importing them into your code, which would enable it to interact with these networks. Normally, you’d have to do that separately, installing the libraries one by one, figuring out what exactly you need to import to your code, and how it all works. With peaq SDK, though, you just install and import the SDK itself, write a few lines of code creating its specific instance, and there you go, the connection with peaq is live.
With this instance up and running, you can also simplify another crucial step — creating a peaq ID, which is a machine’s self-sovereign ID on the peaq network. Doing so is, again, a matter of writing (or copy-pasting from the code samples) a few lines of code. To read a peaq ID, you’d just have to change a single word.
All of this ultimately helps a very wide range of builders, from a founder working on a DePIN or a manufacturer looking to outfit their devices with peaq IDs off the shelf to a hobbyist playing with the testnet. All of them can leverage the SDK to access some of peaq’s core functions without having to dive deep into the underlying tech stack.
In other words, it’s all about making the process of building on peaq as easy as possible.
Of course, this is not the limit. As a community-first project, peaq aspires to be as user-and developer-friendly as possible, to the point where we wouldn’t even have to distinguish between the two kinds of friendliness.
So with that, here are a few features coming to the SDK with future updates:
And there you have it — a set of functions meant to make building on peaq as easy as possible. We will make sure to keep the finger on the pulse with the feedback from the projects building on peaq and the community, so if there’s any other functions you’d like to see on this list, don’t be a stranger and let us know now.
