I have mentioned previously that Truffle & TestRPC are my development tools of choice for Ethereum based development.

truffle logo

It is exciting to see that there have been new releases of both Truffle & TestRPC. I have been hanging out in the Truffle Gitter channel, and been fielding lots of questions about installation issues on Windows. As Tim has previously blogged, there have been a number of issues with installation. The installation issues were mostly due to compiling C based libraries, and requiring a number of build tools on the local machine. These issues have now been removed as Truffle & TestRPC are both now built, and then released as a completely pre-packaged release. This also means that installation times have dropped from 10 minutes, to 10 seconds! (Which means I'll need to go back and update some of my old tutorials )

 

Truffle

Highlights: More reliable installation. Makes it easier for everyone to jump in and start playing!

https://github.com/trufflesuite/truffle/releases/tag/v3.3.0

TestRPC

Highlights: Installs quicker. Reduced memory consumption. Ability to persist the blockchain to disk, meaning you can suspend and then resume if you like  (I'll still be using it mostly as a throw away in memory style dev environment).

https://github.com/ethereumjs/testrpc/releases/tag/v4.0.0

Whats next?

I've been waiting in suspense for these updated installers to drop for many months now. There have been a couple of projects on my backlog that had been blocked until this came out. A short list of what I'll be working on in the near term are: