On July 31, EOS has announced Demux, a new open-source development tool for the EOSIO community that simplifies complex DAPP development.
Demux draws inspiration from Facebook’s Flux Architecture pattern and Redux, creating a back-end infrastructure pattern for sourcing blockchain events in order to deterministically update queryable databases for applications built on the EOSIO blockchain.
This suggested architecture allows application developers to use traditional Mongo or Postgres SQL databases in a way that means the data stored in them is still verifiable by the blockchain. This enables the best of both worlds: the flexibility and speed of traditional databases, coupled with the trust and immutable properties of a blockchain.
When building more complex DAPPs, you run into a few problems when retrieving data directly from the blockchain:
- The query interface used to retrieve the indexed data is limited. Complex data requirements can mean you either have to make an excess number of queries and process the data in your DAPP, or you must store additional sorted data on the blockchain itself.
- Additionally, scaling your query load means requiring more blockchain endpoint nodes, which can be expensive.
Demux solves these problems by off-loading storage and queries to your preferred database (MongoDB, Postgres etc). As blockchain events happen, your chosen database is updated by Updater functions, which deterministically process an array of Action objects. The database can then be queried by your front-end DAPP through a suitable API (for example, REST or GraphQL), reducing the amount of direct interaction with the blockchain in order to retrieve data for your application. This also can help developers to limit the amount of data that needs to be stored in RAM, lowering applications’ operating costs whilst also improving their architectural efficiency.
