Summary of Components

So far, all of our interaction with Cardano has been through the cardano-cli and a locally running cardano-node. While it is perfectly fine for one-off tasks and goals, building complex products/protocols entirely in a scripting languages will prove difficult to maintain and scale. Further, most developers are far more productive building in their preferred languages and ecosystems.

A Birds Eye View

Image courtesy of Cardano docs

🚧 Thorough Overview Diagram coming soon

As described in our earlier post Running a Full Cardano Node, through a set of bespoke protocols the cardano-node serves as the main integration point to many downstream components utilising the node-to-client protocol. These downstream components can:

• Perform ad-hoc queries through the local-state-query mini-protocol
  • cardano-cli
  • ogmios
  • cardano-wallet
• Submit transactions via the local-tx-submission mini-protocol
  • cardano-cli
  • ogmios
  • cardano-wallet
• Propagate, consume and persist chainDB data through the chain-sync mini-protocol
  • cardano-wallet
  • db-sync

Over the course of our Getting Started content, our guides made use of the first two mini-protocols using the cardano-cli to query the chain and submit our transactions. We will touch on the third chain-sync protocol in our following post on querying the chain.

For many developers the biggest hurdle with integration stems from the fact that these cardano-node specific protocols are not meant for external public consumption, and even direct internal consumption can be difficult if you are not familiar with Haskell. Luckily there are two options - you can either host your own pipeline of components to integrate with Cardano or rely on community-built SDKs and external hosted APIs.

Self-hosted vs External APIs

🚧 More content coming soon

Use-cases

ECommerce

1. A store creates and manages sets of keys to generate payment addresses to receive payments for orders
2. A customer creates and manages their own set of keys and addresses through their wallet(s)
3. The store listens for customer payments at their payment addresses
4. The customer submits a transaction as a payment to the store’s given address with additional metadata of purchase
5. For every valid payment the store will create and process an order in their (off-chain) systems
6. The store either
   • Records a successful order on-chain via a new transaction with metadata
   • Refunds the payment back to the customer if it cannot be fulfilled

🚧 More content coming soon

Advanced Queries for Cardano

Continue to Querying the Chain ➡️