Announcing Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.2

Today, we are pleased to announce that Hyperledger Sawtooth release 1.2 is available! Since the 1.1 release, Sawtooth has continued to grow in capability, diversity, and adoption, thanks to the involvement of many organizations and open source community members. The release of Sawtooth 1.2 shows that growth with the active contribution of features and improvements by an engaged community of developers.

The latest version of Sawtooth provides exciting new benefits — namely, full support for the PBFT consensus engine and for mobile application development with new SDKs for iOS and Android. 

Additionally, this release contains transaction family compatibility with Sawtooth Sabre, enhanced performance & stability, improved documentation, better support for consensus algorithms, and overall platform refinements for a better developer experience.  

PBFT 1.0 Consensus in Sawtooth

The dynamic consensus interface, introduced in Sawtooth 1.1, allows for easy integration with consensus engines that meet a variety of use cases. Sawtooth 1.1 included support for PoET, PBFT, and Raft consensus. Now, Sawtooth PBFT 1.0 is the preferred consensus for  small-to-medium networks — it’s leader-based, non-forking, and fast. PBFT also provides the safety and liveness guarantees that are necessary for operating a blockchain network with adversarial trust. This makes PBFT an excellent option for smaller consortium-style networks.

Complete procedures are provided for configuring PBFT consensus on a Sawtooth node and network. For more information, see Creating a Sawtooth Test Network in the Application Developer’s Guide or Setting Up a Sawtooth Network in the System Administrator’s Guide.

Mobile Support in Sawtooth

Release 1.2 ushers in support for mobile development in Sawtooth with the inclusion of a new Swift SDK for iOS and improved Java SDK for Android. New tutorials and SDK reference documentation for Swift and Java help developers write native mobile client applications for Sawtooth. 

Transaction Family Compatibility with Sabre

All core transaction families are now compatible with Sawtooth Sabre release 0.4.0, a WebAssembly smart contract engine for Hyperledger Sawtooth. This compatibility is a major step towards allowing the default transaction families to be managed as on-chain smart contracts. 

Improved Documentation

We are making strong efforts to support developers by continuing to improve the content and quality of Sawtooth documentation. In this release, you will find Swift and Java tutorials, procedures for configuring a consensus engine, and improved summaries of the supported consensus algorithms for PBFT, PoET, Raft, and Devmode. There are also numerous technical corrections, bug fixes, and general improvements throughout the documentation.

Refinements

This release includes a number of refinements designed to improve performance & stability, allow quicker builds, enhance support for consensus algorithms, and provide development options such as access to raw transaction headers through a new API. For details, see the Release 1.2 (Chime) release notes.

Try Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.2 Today!

Sawtooth version 1.2 is available now, so there’s no need to wait. To get your hands on it, use the links below. If you are new to Sawtooth and would like to get involved, take a look at the community links.

• See the Sawtooth website to learn more about Hyperledger Sawtooth.
• Try out Sawtooth using the Ubuntu, Docker, or Kubernetes procedures in the Sawtooth documentation.
• Find the code on Github in sawtooth-core and related repositories.
• Join the ongoing community discussions at the #sawtooth channel on Hyperledger Chat and on the Hyperledger Sawtooth mailing list.

About the Hyperledger Sawtooth Team

Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.2 is the result of the collaboration and dedication of many people. Significant contributions were provided by Cargill, Bitwise IO, Intel, and others. Special thanks to Peter Schwarz, Darian Plumb, Anne Chenette, Shawn Amundson, Ryan Beck-Buysse, Richard Berg, Arun S M, Logan Seeley, Andrea Gunderson, Shannyn Telander, and Eloá França Verona.