Apillon lowers the entry barrier and brings the development of Web3 products and apps down to just a couple of steps and a few lines of code.
The increasing use of legacy programming languages and environments has led to solutions that ease the developers’ work, allowing them to devote more time to perfecting the outcome instead of dealing with the basics of utilized technologies.
Web3 is built upon an entirely new infrastructure, unique in its offering and programming setup. But its aim remains the same — to serve as many users and developers as possible. Apillon makes it more easily accessible and puts it into practice faster.
Challenges of building in Web3
Many developers and businesses still find Web3 intimidating for various reasons. For one, it takes a serious skill set to build products utilizing technologies for decentralized management successfully.
But also, the marketing narrative around Web3 has unintentionally turned it into a seemingly private club of only the heavily publicized projects.
The barrier to entry to Web3 could and should be much lower. Web3 developers should be given a streamlined and non-messy way of building products that adapts to their routine workflow. This way, they could focus more on the functionality of the result and spend less energy diving into every nook and cranny of the technology infrastructure.
Heterogeneous sharding of Polkadot
A simplified and unified approach would specifically benefit the key Web ecosystem, Polkadot, due to its particular architectural nature.
Polkadot is a sharded blockchain, meaning it connects several chains together in a single network, allowing them to process transactions in parallel and exchange data between chains with security guarantees. Thanks to Polkadot’s unique heterogeneous sharding model, each chain in the network can be optimized for a specific use case rather than being forced to adapt to a one-size-fits-all model.” — An Introduction to Polkadot, Polkadot Lightpaper
For an insider, this heterogeneity provides excellent opportunities for building use-case-oriented solutions. But to a Web3 newbie, accessing parachains' features and combining them is quite a challenge:
- Polkadot parachains belong to the same ecosystem, but also come with unique setups and requirements.
- The uniqueness of Polkadot parachains is great for addressing specific cases, but this also makes them function as separate entities and difficult to implement jointly within a single app.
- Existing Web3 projects typically connect to a single parachain network, but only a few have shown the capability to plug into multiple parachains at once, utilizing various Web3 features and tapping into their full growth potential.
The glue holding shards together
Apillon is a unified Web3 development platform that addresses the issues above.
Primarily, it binds Polkadot parachains together and provides developers with easy access to their unique features via dedicated APIs. Developers can build Web3 solutions for business, individuals, or P2P use without deep-diving into each parachain's technological prerequisites and specifics, which saves time, effort, and invested resources.
Plus, existing Web3 projects can be upgraded easily by adding more parachains and new features, thus covering more use cases and expanding their growth potential.
Given the early stage of the blockchain ecosystem and the infancy of Web3, developers will need to keep up with a long trajectory of future changes, security tweaks, and functionality updates to keep their Web3 projects alive. This could take a heavy toll on the project budget, heavier than the funds invested in the initial development.
To streamline the development of Web3 products and make it more user- and budget-friendly, a development platform that integrates automatic updates was only a matter of time.
Developing a Web3 product from scratch
Due to the complexity of blockchain technology, individual stacks, and unique sets of requirements on each network and protocol, developing new solutions on Web3 is no walk in the park.
When building on Web3, be it within the Polkadot ecosystem or general, developers face challenges that lack proper addressing.
- Difficult choice and understanding of new protocols and solutions launched every month
- Each protocol and parachain dedicated to an isolated use case
- Low protocol-level thinking
- Custom token for every protocol
- Potentially high token volatility
- UX and documentation issues
To build a Web3 product from scratch, a developer needs to do (at least) the following:
- Have a solid understanding of and experience in product development using blockchain technology
- Select a network and/or parachain that would support their product
- Research protocols for the chosen network and/or parachain
- Buy and use the network or parachain's native token to pay for employed services
- Learn how to integrate and combine those services
- Build, implement, shift, test; see how users respond, edit and adapt; rinse and repeat
- Maintain their Web3 product, and make updates for protocol changes
Developing a Web3 product with Apillon
With Apillon, the Web3 development process is radically different.
The Apillon platform abstracts the intricacy of linked parachains and delivers them in an easy-to-use format. Developers can start building a Web3 product right away, bypassing underlying technological complexity.
Example #1: Building on KILT Protocol*
To build a simple Web3 app utilizing KILT Protocol for user authentication from scratch, a developer needs to do (at least) the following:
- Research the KILT Documentation
- Configure and integrate the KILT Protocol
- Generate and manage KILT's Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs)
- Attest the validity and functionality of the outcome
- Handle the custody, purchase, and payments of the KILT token
- Upgrade and maintain the end product with protocol upgrades
Using the Apillon platform, on the other hand, a developer simply calls a function (e. g., createUserWithEmailAndPassword) from the Apillon SDK and sends the required parameters. The function creates a fully working user DID in the back end.
Example #2: Building on Crust Network*
To build a simple Web3 app utilizing Crust for file storage from scratch, a developer needs to do (at least) the following:
- Research the Crust documentation
- Configure and integrate the Crust Protocol
- Handle the custody, purchase, and payments of the CRU token
- Manage the FILE expiry
- Upgrade and maintain the end product with protocol upgrades
Using the Apillon platform, on the other hand, a developer simply calls a function (e. g.,getStorage()) and moves the files to a decentralized, pinned service provided by Crust and IPFS.
In both cases, the resources spent on building a functional Web3 application with Apillon are significantly reduced, and the product's go-to-market trajectory much shorter and streamlined.
*Disclaimer
These examples are technically highly simplified to illustrate the problematic context of building a Web3 product to the general public, whereas in technical reality, the process is much more complex. Examples used do not intend to imply in any way that either KILT or Crust are challenging to use but merely to show that these processes require serious work and introduce friction in cases where developers utilize several parachains to build a single solution.
Easier access, faster adoption
Apillon lowers the entry barrier to Web3 and provides developers with new, simplified means to create working products on Polkadot parachains - simply by using legacy systems and standard programming knowledge.
A developer building a Web3 app using the Apillon platform can simply attach the needed service, call a function, and code it to suit the needs of the product.
With its complete set of tools, the Apillon platform aims to support thousands of developers, regardless of their background, to onboard the Web3 train, and to boost the adoption of individual Polkadot/Kusama parachains and distributed technologies in the real economy.
Learn more in the Apillon Wiki and create your Apillon account. 👇
This article was originally published on Apillon Medium.
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