Introduction to Hyperledger Composer - Key Concepts

Welcome to Hyperledger Composer

Hyperledger Composer is an extensive, open development toolset and framework to make developing blockchain applications easier. Our primary goal is to accelerate time to value, and make it easier to integrate your blockchain applications with the existing business systems. You can use Composer to rapidly develop use cases and deploy a blockchain solution in weeks rather than months. Composer allows you to model your business network and integrate existing systems and data with your blockchain applications.

Hyperledger Composer supports the existing Hyperledger Fabric blockchain infrastructure and runtime, which supports pluggable blockchain consensus protocols to ensure that transactions are validated according to policy by the designated business network participants.

Everyday applications can consume the data from business networks, providing end users with simple and controlled access points.

You can use Hyperledger Composer to quickly model your current business network, containing your existing assets and the transactions related to them; assets are tangible or intangible goods, services, or property. As part of your business network model, you define the transactions which can interact with assets. Business networks also include the participants who interact with them, each of which can be associated with a unique identity, across multiple business networks.

How does Hyperledger Composer work in practice?

For an example of a business network in action; a realtor can quickly model their business network as such:

Assets: houses and listings

Participants: buyers and homeowners

Transactions: buying or selling houses, and creating and closing listings

Participants can have their access to transactions restricted based on their role as either a buyer, seller, or realtor. The realtor can then create an application to present buyers and sellers with a simple user interface for viewing open listings and making offers. This business network could also be integrated with existing inventory system, adding new houses as assets and removing sold properties. Relevant other parties can be registered as participants, for example a land registry might interact with a buyer to transfer ownership of the land.

Key Concepts in Hyperledger Composer

Hyperledger Composer is a programming model containing a modeling language, and a set of APIs to quickly define and deploy business networks and applications that allow participants to send transactions that exchange assets.

Hyperledger Composer Components

You can experience Hyperledger Composer with our browser-based UI called Hyperledger Composer Playground. Playground is available as a hosted version (no install necessary) or a local install (good for editing and testing sample business networks offline).

Developers who want to use Hyperledger Composer's full application development capabilities should install the Developer Tools.

Key Concepts in Hyperledger Composer

Blockchain State Storage

All transactions submitted through a business network are stored on the blockchain ledger, and the current state of assets and participants are stored in the blockchain state database. The blockchain distributes the ledger and the state database across a set of peers and ensures that updates to the ledger and state database are consistent across all peers using a consensus algorithm.

Connection Profiles

Hyperledger Composer uses Connection Profiles to connect to a runtime. A Connection Profile is a JSON document that lives in the user's home directory (or may come from an environment variable) and is referenced by name when using the Composer APIs or the Command Line tools. Using connection profiles ensures that code and scripts are easily portable from one runtime instance to another. You can read more about Connection Profiles in the reference section.

Assets

Assets are tangible or intangible goods, services, or property, and are stored in registries. Assets can represent almost anything in a business network, for example, a house for sale, the sale listing, the land registry certificate for that house, and the insurance documents for that house may all be assets in one or more business networks.

Assets must have a unique identifier, but other than that, they can contain whatever properties you define. Assets may be related to other assets or participants.

Participants

Participants are members of a business network. They may own assets and submit transactions. Participant types are modeled, and like assets, must have an identifier and can have any other properties as required.

Identities and ID cards

Within a business network, participants can be associated with an identity. ID cards are a combination of an identity, a connection profile, and metadata. ID cards simplify the process of connecting to a business network, and extend the concept of an identity outside the business network to a 'wallet' of identities, each associated with a specific business network and connection profile.

Transactions

Transactions are the mechanism by which participants interact with assets. This could be as simple as a participant placing a bid on a asset in an auction, or an auctioneer marking an auction closed, automatically transferring ownership of the asset to the highest bidder.

Queries

Queries are used to return data about the blockchain world-state. Queries are defined within a business network, and can include variable parameters for simple customization. By using queries, data can be easily extracted from your blockchain network. Queries are sent by using the Hyperledger Composer API.

Events

Events are defined in the business network definition in the same way as assets or participants. Once events have been defined, they can be emitted by transaction processor functions to indicate to external systems that something of importance has happened to the ledger. Applications can subscribe to emitted events through the composer-client API.

Access Control

Business networks may contain a set of access control rules. Access control rules allow fine-grained control over what participants have access to what assets in the business network and under what conditions. The access control language is rich enough to capture sophisticated conditions declaratively, such as "only the owner of a vehicle can transfer ownership of the vehicle". Externalizing access control from transaction processor function logic makes it easier to inspect, debug, develop and maintain.

Historian registry

The historian is a specialised registry which records successful transactions, including the participants and identities that submitted them. The historian stores transactions as HistorianRecord assets, which are defined in the Hyperledger Composer system namespace.