The latest versions of the IBM Blockchain Platform and Hyperledger Fabric hail a new era of capabilities that bring simplicity, speed, and value to the blockchain developer community.

A simple SDK for smart contract and application development

Hyperledger Fabric v1.4 makes smart contracts a truly native concept. Feature

In the near future, these new features will allow you to automatically generate REST APIs that closely model their business domain. The result will be a business-ready API to the blockchain, and simpler integration with existing (non-blockchain) systems of record. You can read more about these features and participate in the development process via the

IBM Blockchain Platform IDE

When building smart contracts and blockchain applications with Hyperledger Fabric, you will also benefit from using the new IBM Blockchain Platform IDE. It enables you to discover, code, test, debug, package, deploy, and publish smart contracts and applications using a single tool. We created the IBM Blockchain Platform IDE as an extension to Visual Studio Code (VSCode), and it is available now in the Visual Studio Code Marketplace. We’re developing the extension in the open, so developers and partners can work with us; check out the issues in the GitHub repository (blockchain-vscode-extension).

While all these capabilities have been inspired by Hyperledger Composer, IBM will no longer be contributing new features to it. Instead, IBM will focus all application development enhancements on Hyperleder Fabric so they can be directly leveraged by the IBM Blockchain Platform. For every Fabric 1.x release, IBM will provide support for Composer so that existing developers can continue to use it for proofs-of-concept and demos.