Introducing a Tour of Textile
The fastest way to build your next decentralized app using IPFS
Update: The Tour has been updated! Textile now has Buckets, Thread Services, multi-user collaboration and more. Check it all out in our new documentation.
Build a decentralized chat app in 3 commands? Check! Build a secure distributed database for location data in 5 lines of code? Check! It’s easier than ever to start building decentralized apps thanks to Textile’s ecosystem of decentralized developer tools. And we now have the docs to prove it. We’re pleased to announce a Tour of Textile, which is a great place to start if you’re a developer interested in using decentralized technologies in your next mobile, desktop, or web applications, or just interested in learning more about decentralized technologies.
So what’s this tour about exactly?
It’s about decentralized development with Textile. The document explores several topics core to Textile and assumes the reader is somewhat familiar with Textile in general, wallets and accounts, contacts and peers, threads and blocks, files, schemas, and mills, and even Textile cafes. Links are provided for all of these topics here, and in the Tour, so sit back, relax, and get reading.
A @textileio contact can be thought of as a set of ephemeral agents (peers) owned by a single account. https://t.co/1xRkK7TwxT pic.twitter.com/xKRj0BW1py
— Sander Pick (@sanderpick) May 14, 2019
What can you expect to learn?
Once you’re ready, its time to get started with the actual hands-on tour. Along the way, you’ll find several tips, hints, and informational blurbs to help guide you towards additional information, insights, or new concepts. If you come across any concepts or ideas that aren’t covered that you think should be, please let us know — this is a dynamic document that will continuously update as new features and tooling are added and refined.
The tour takes a decidedly playful approach to use Textile tools, with a focus on keeping things interesting as you move along. Are you interested in building a decentralized mobile app? We’ve got you covered? The command-line is your game? Sure, explore Textile that way. We’ve included the corresponding code snippets for all our client libraries (Cli, Javascript, React Native, iOS, and Android) to keep you moving regardless of your platform of choice. You’ll learn how to setup an account, sync it with the network, search for and add contacts, interact with other peers, create and interact with Textile threads, and even make a decentralized photo album (featuring dogs because frankly, there are too many cat examples out there already 😉).
Things like IPFS, encryption, directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), schemas, and other more technical items are touched upon generally in the tour, with links to more in-depth sources as needed. Again, if you find any topics particularly confusing, or in need of further elaboration, don’t hesitate to let us know, we’re happy to integrate more information as needed.
Any data added to a thread ends up as a file. Most of the time, a schema is used to define one or more types of data in a thread such that other users and apps can understand it. https://t.co/pp2eMaihbr pic.twitter.com/5qqIAFDXLV
— Sander Pick (@sanderpick) May 14, 2019
Get touring!
Ok, time to head on over to https://docs.textile.io/a-tour-of-textile to get started on the tour. While you’re at it, feel free to jump on our community Slack channel, where you can ask any questions that might crop up during the tour, or say hello 👋. If you like what you see in the tour, you can also feel free to reach out to the Textile team on Twitter or email to find out more, discuss collaboration opportunities, or even talk about integrating Textile into your next app or project.
Finally, if you are headed to IPFS Camp, let us know! We’d love to hear your feedback and connect in person.