abfcd08903
While I'd hoped to be able to make the socket client less weird, I think that this is a nice middle ground in terms of improving readability and removing the vestigal components without breaking anything or radically changing the underlying assumptions. In the future we'd want to have requests be identified by a request ID, and then we could drop the request tracking logic in the client entirely, and this is protocol breaking. The alternatives aren't substantively different than the current implementation.
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.