Inside OCAP Service
What is OCAP Service?
OCAP is an open-source protocol that provides an abstract layer for accessing underlying blockchains and enables your application to work across different blockchains in a unified way.
In OCAP service we wrapped the functionalities of RPC/API from various supported chains into an easy to use, easy to learn interface so that you can "learn once, write any chains". The interface is built on top of GraphQL.
Why OCAP Service?
In today's marketplace, there are many hurdles preventing developers and businesses from fully leveraging decentralized blockchain applications and services. Whether it's poor performance, cost and complexity of development, or the lack of features that will typically lead to community segmentation through a forked branch that separates development and computing resources, building decentralized applications and services today requires a lot of specialization and and does not deliver good speed to market costing developers and businesses previous time and revenue.
ArcBlock's goal is to create an easy to use development platform that gives developers the features, capabilities, and services they need to get their application or service to market quickly and remove burdensome administration and ongoing costs of maintaining a decentralized application or service.
ArcBlock's development platform removes those barriers by greatly simplifying the entire development process by providing a platform service that delivers a comprehensive solution combining blockchain technology with cloud computing. Described below some of the primary features and benefits of the ArcBlock platform.
Key to the entire platform is ArcBlock's Open Chain Access Protocol or OCAP. OCAP represents a considerable innovation for developers by removing the typical vendor lock-in and giving developers the power and freedom to evaluate, test, deploy and manage different blockchain protocols seamlessly and without having to change their code. OCAP works by creating an abstract layer that lives in between the code and desired blockchain technology and is then combined with a plug-in-play blockchain "adapter" that gives them the ability to use blockchain technologies interchangeably.
The benefit to the developer is that they now have a unified platform that allows them to write their code once and then they can use one, two or different/multiple blockchain technologies simultaneously by merely adding/swapping the blockchain protocol adapters. In today's market, this is increasingly important as business rules change, or application requirements are updated. Blockchain protocols are inherently rigid and don't adapt to new business rules without being forked. Because of ArcBlock, no longer do developers have to change their business logic or code to meet that business change; they can instead adapt their app by merely adding the new blockchain technology that meets their needs.