The Intellectual Wilderness

The path from an empty directory to a minimally working web server you can start playing with is not always straight forward, and for newcomers to Erlang in particular the traditional "Erlang release" concept can be a bit of a stumbling block. ZX brings a workflow more familiar to modern developers to the Erlang world and Cowboy is a popular, modern, and battle-tested webserver that fully implements http1, http2, spdy, websockets, etc. Together the combination is fantastic, whether you are familiar with Cowboy already or are just trying to figure out how to get your first Erlang web project up and running. To install ZX you require an Erlang runtime on your system, visit this page: https://zxq9.com/projects/zomp/qs.install.en.html The one-liner install method for unix-type systems is very quick and easy. The demonstration is performed on a unix-type system. ZX does work on Windows, but development is a bit more cumbersome on Windows, so be aware.

Blockchain tooling can be pretty confusing and tends to suffer a strange situation where the blockchains with the most utility often have the worst tooling and interop libraries. The tooling necessary to connect to the Aeternity blockchain happens to be very easy to get working with Erlang using ZX, however. In this demo we continue on from the previous video (creating a Cowboy web service using ZX, here https://rumble.com/v2xvn0k ) and extend that to adding the ability to talk with the Aeternity blockchain.