At some point, you’ll have to stop architecting, and start coding. The good news is that web3 is full of dapp-building tutorials and templates:
- Create a Simple Dapp, from the MetaMask Docs – this is actually MetaMask’s own internal wallet functionality testing tool. Useful to have on hand!
- Truffle’s “From Idea to Minimum Viable Dapp” series, parts one, two, and three. And, of course, there are all the Truffle Boxes.
- Create a dapp using Truffle and React, from Infura, if you’re interested in using the React framework.
-
How to Build a NFT Marketplace DApp on Ethereum or Optimism, from Truffle
- If you're looking to do something with NFTs, bookmark this encyclopedic blog post from Infura now
- Create an NFT Music album with the Truffle NFT SDK box, from Infura
The Ethereum API: Reference and learning resources
As you build out from one of these wireframes, you’ll need to begin familiarizing yourself with the Ethereum JSON-RPC API. This is how your dapp will communicate with the blockchain in order to get the information it needs to serve its users. The Ethereum API is, of course, a publicly maintained API, and there are multiple sources of information about it. The Ethereum Foundation's specification is available here.
We recommend Truffle's ganache.dev interactive Ethereum JSON-RPC API documentation. It includes not just a very complete set of API information, with descriptions, return object definitions, and code examples; it also features an environment where you can run the code, live.
An API this big can be overwhelming. If you're looking for a place to start, we recommend Infura's orientation to the Ethereum API, focusing on key methods and diving deep into important topics surrounding tokens and transactions.
As a dapp developer, though, you’ll want to be thinking of user experience, and you should be aware of MetaMask’s Permissions System, and how that interacts with the Ethereum API.
For a list of which public blockchain networks use all, or part of the Ethereum JSON-RPC API on their own networks, check out Infura’s reference material.
So, you’ve got your API reference, you’re ready to make some calls; where are you sending those calls?
Again–for local development, you can spin up a local test blockchain with Ganache, to imitate a production environment without spending live gas tokens. But what happens when you’re ready to move your project off of local development, and start testing on a live testnet, or mainnet?
Which network are you deploying to?
If you haven’t thought about this yet, now is the time to jump to our Network Node, and figure out which network(s) will be the best fit for your project.
Scaling your dapp
For those planning on deploying to Ethereum or another public blockchain network: What happens when your dapp gets really popular, and you need a scaling solution that allows your dapp to make hundreds of thousands, millions of API calls per month?
You do what one blue chip crypto project after another has done: use Infura.