Should new developers wait for Catapult?

Technical Discussion
#1

Hi there,

I’m relatively new to NEM, have been harvesting XEM for about two months now. As my day job is software development, I am also interested in potentially contributing to the project’s code, so I was looking for a starting point.

I found some documentation for developers via nem,io, but at first glance it seems a bit anecdotal and outdated. Especially since there are a lot of references to Java code, while I understood that currently the code base is being rewritten in C++ under the Catapult project.

Before I’d dive in deeply I’d like to know how much relevance this documentation still has. Also, does it still make sense to attempt development in the now available code base at all, or should potential new developers wait for the Catapult code to go open source?

#2

Hi, Nematode. I’m a op though not a dev, I believe we don’t have to do too much on NEM core. Now it is in JAVA later C++ maybe. It doesn’t matter. We can study catapult code. But only core devs want to upgrade it. In my opinion the APIs are the same. So you can consider it a black box. Just like I use Linux everyday, I write bash scripts on it but I don’t care about Linux kenel codes.:laughing:

#3

Thanks a lot for explaining, zhankaiwen!

Does that mean that all the bounty projects are separate from the NEM core code? If so, why are the development guides that can be found on the public nem.io website all NEM core related? I would say the general (programming enthusiast) public only needs to deal with the API then, and the Java guides are only relevant for core members themselves. Shouldn’t it be internal documentation rather than public?

#4

From what I’ve heard from the developers on the chat channel, they are working on a new site with new tutorials. I believe most of the stuff on NEM.io are outdated and will be revamped.

There is a nodejs library with APIs if that’s relevant to you. It’s also a bit dated but I think you can get started and play around with NEM until further updates come out. https://github.com/QuantumMechanics/NEM-sdk/blob/master/README.md

#5

:sweat_smile: I don’t know about it in details but I think you can refer to NanoWallet Project first. It is written in Node.js. I think it doesn’t rely on the NEM core code. It’s an application NanoWallet on github

#6

Thank you guys for the info! Hope the new site will be up soon. I’ll start experimenting with the NanoWallet code in the mean time.