A bit of history
I started development of web3j back in September 2016, with the initial release coinciding with Devcon2 in Shanghai.
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.
web3j in 2018
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
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.
One last thing…
We’re always on the hunt for great Java/Kotlin/Golang devs to join us at
blk.io — please
get in touch if you’d like to have a chat.