How the functional elements of AppLayer interact with each other.
This chapter aims to explain in technical detail how the BDK is implemented, as well as its submodules and how everything comes together to deliver a blazing fast blockchain.
The first few subchapters paint a more holistic view of the BDK, as most components are pretty straight-forward to understand, and developers are expected to use the Doxygen documentation as a reference to further understand how the project works. The later subchapters show some components that are particularly denser and/or complex enough that they warrant their own separated explanations.
Looking at a higher level of abstraction, the original C++ implementation of the BDK is structured like this:
The src/bins folder contains the source files for the project's main executables - the blockchain executable itself, contract ABI generator and other testing-related executables are all coded here in their respective subfolders
The src/contract folder contains everything related to the logic of smart contracts - from ABI parsing to custom variable types and template contracts
The src/core folder contains the heart of the BDK - the main components of the blockchain and what makes it tick
The src/libs folder contains third-party libraries not inherently tied to the project but used throughout development
The src/net folder contains everything related to networking, communication between nodes and support for protocols such as gRPC, HTTP, P2P, JSON-RPC, etc.
The src/utils folder contains several commonly-used functions, structures, classes and overall logic to support the functioning of the BDK as a whole
Source tree
For the more visually inclined, here is a source tree (headers only) containing all of the files inside the src folder (except src/bins as it only contains source files), their respective subfolders and which components are declared in them. Each component is further explained through the following subchapters of this documentation. For more technical details (e.g. API references for developers), please refer to the Doxygen documentation on the project's own repository.
