61a81279bd
This is the first step in removing the mutex from ABCI applications: making our test applications hold mutexes, which this does, hopefully with zero impact. If this lands well, then we can explore deleting the other mutexes (in the ABCI server and the clients.) While this change is not user impacting at all, removing the other mutexes *will* be. In persuit of this, I've changed the KV app somewhat, to put almost all of the logic in the base application and make the persistent application mostly be a wrapper on top of that with a different storage layer.
Application BlockChain Interface (ABCI)
Blockchains are systems for multi-master state machine replication. ABCI is an interface that defines the boundary between the replication engine (the blockchain), and the state machine (the application). Using a socket protocol, a consensus engine running in one process can manage an application state running in another.
Previously, the ABCI was referred to as TMSP.
The community has provided a number of additional implementations, see the Tendermint Ecosystem
Installation & Usage
To get up and running quickly, see the getting started guide along with the abci-cli documentation which will go through the examples found in the examples directory.
Specification
A detailed description of the ABCI methods and message types is contained in:
Protocol Buffers
To compile the protobuf file, run (from the root of the repo):
make protoc_abci
See protoc --help and the Protocol Buffers site
for details on compiling for other languages. Note we also include a GRPC
service definition.