web3j ECF update

The Ethereum Community Fund (ECF) recently announced funding for web3j. Here at blk.io it’s been great to get this support from the ECF to help supercharge the development of the library.

A bit of history

I started development of web3j back in September 2016, with the initial release coinciding with Devcon2 in Shanghai.

reddit ecf blog — *The original web3j announcement on Reddit, September 2016*

The community of the library has gone from strength to strength, but it’s always been a difficult balancing act continuing to develop the library without any direct support for it. The funding from the ECF is significant in that it enables us to put a full-time resource on the library.

As such we’re now in the position where we’re getting all of the backend infrastructure together to support very streamlined release processes with regular release cadence. We’ll also be able to start clearing the backlog of pull requests and issues, before commencing on some brand new web3j initiatives!

Snapshot builds

We’re pleased to announce that snapshot builds are now available if you need functionality that has been merged to the library but hasn’t yet been released. For instance, to use the web3j 4.0 snapshot, simply add the following to your Gradle build file:

repositories {
   maven {
      url "https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots"
   }
}// ...dependencies {
    compile "org.web3j:core:4.0.0-SNAPSHOT",
            // ...
}

web3j 3.6

The web3j 3.6 milestone was also released last week, which you can read more about.

Going forwards

The future is bright for web3j, the project now:

Has over 2000 stars on GitHub
Receives over 20,000 downloads per month (it’s over 100,000 if you count the individual modules)
Has over 600 members in it’s Gitter community
It is the second most popular Java blockchain library on GitHub — the number one spot is still held by BitcoinJ, which given its age and the overall popularity of Bitcoin still is no surprise.

With Devcon 4 just around the corner we’ve got another big announcement, so please stay tuned.