Raison d'être

Why Apophis SDK exists. Feel free to skip this page if that's none of your interest.

Sometimes, I get into an ecosystem, check out the standard library for development, and just think to myself "wtf is this?" Frankly, this was one such occasion. At least when I started developing this library, and at the time of writing, cosmjs is an absolute chaos:

The landing page of the cosmjs "documentation"

Knowing nothing about the ecosystem yet, seeing this as the official "documentation" was not just overwhelming, but utterly confusing. What are all these packages? Which one should I use to get started communicating with my smart contracts? Clicking on one of these packages brought absolutely no clarity. In fact, it just added to my bafflement:

The home page of the @cosmjs/amino package

And frankly, the documentations of the individual types and methods was barely any help either:

Highly descriptive documentation of the coins method

I felt lost. I didn't know where to start, or how to get started. So I went on a journey. And literally learned how to build blockchains using the Cosmos SDK. Just to learn how to connect to my smart contracts. I learned about Amino and ProtoBuf, I learned about Cosmos SDK build systems, its messages and services, I learned the Go programming language just so I could read the Cosmos SDK source code - because the Cosmos SDK documentation, albeit infinitely better, is still not sufficiently documented and hard to search - I learned the protobuf wire format just to be able to debug errors in my encoding.

Everything I've learned is distilled into Apophis. And I bring extensive experience in web development.

I've built this SDK from scratch, targeting more modern ECMA standards to reduce footprint & dependencies and improving interpretability of bundled code. For instance, we actually use bigints as opposed to Uint53 strings, and Uint8Arrays instead of Buffers or - even worse - more strings. As dependency hell is very real in the JS ecosystem, I've also made it a point to minimize the number of dependencies, and to choose crypto libraries (scure and noble) that are well maintained by independent active entities in the larger crypto industry as well as professionally audited. Apophis also does not need polyfills and uses fetch instead of axios, so you don't need to configure your build process to get it to work in the browser.

I've made it a point to focus on developer experience and time-to-dapp. I've made it a point to simplify and normalize integration of new chains and SDK modules as much as I can. And I've made it a point to write an actual documentation with a proper guide to how to get started ASAP.

And I really, really hate rudimentary generated code, or chained code generation. Such code often suffers from low quality, redundancy, bloat, and is hard to simplify. Thus, I will make it a point to build better code generation tools for protobuf types of the Cosmos SDK and CosmWasm smart contracts.

While the JSON schemas we commonly generate from CosmWasm smart contracts is useful in its own respect, these schemas have already lost information about the original types, simply because this information cannot be expressed in JSON schemas. Accordingly, TypeScript generated from these schemas cannot distinguish between a regular string and a stringified u64, or between a regular string and a base64-encoded byte array, which leads to a degradation of developer experience.