Overview

Distributed apps have some unique qualities:

• Offline-first, they work even when internet connectivity is unreliable.
• Resilient to censorship, making it difficult for centralized actors to shut them down.
• Transparent and immutable, perfectly suited for cases where an ecosystem of organizations benefit from verifiable accountability.

But! Building peer-to-peer apps can be really hard. Having a distributed network of peers instead of a centralized server that you maintain makes it hard to understand and monitor the state of the app.

Furthermore, there aren't a lot of resources out there to help developers have a smooth building experience.

This is why built p2p Shipyard. It's an all-inclusive development suite for building peer-to-peer apps.

Tech stack

Our goal is to create performant, resilient and flexible peer-to-peer apps, that can deliver a simple and smooth user experience to our users.

To that end, these are the tools that we chose:

• holochain as the distributed data verification protocol to build peer-to-peer apps.

• iroh as the underlying network transport to send peer-to-peer messages.

• tauri to distribute apps for both desktop and mobile targets.

• CRDT based algorithms like automerge to build real-time collaborative modules.

Building

Excited to start building? Move on to creating an app to start the journey of building a peer-to-peer app.