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Smart contract development

Kadena Developer documentation is organized into three main content areas:

  • The Smart contracts portion of the documentation is all about learning to write smart contracts and build applications using the Pact smart contract programming language for the Kadena blockchain network. This part of the documentation provides explanations and examples that describe programming language features, introduce Pact-specific concepts and terminology, and expose common programming patterns to help you design and build robust and secure applications.
  • The Reference portion of the documentation provides complete reference information for the Pact programming language—including syntax, keywords, and built-in functions—and the command-line interfaces you can use to interact with Pact smart contracts and the Kadena blockchain in a development, test, or production environment.
  • The Coding projects portion of the documentation provides you with opportunities to apply the information covered in Smart contracts to sample projects with hands-on coding challenges.

Get started with Pact​

In Get started, you'll get an introduction to smart contract development, Pact design principles, and how to navigate the documentation. After the introduction, topics align loosely with the software development life cycle, moving from basic concepts and simple examples to more complex topics as you explore Pact language features and common coding patterns. At a high level, topics are organized to cover the following stages of the software development life cycle:

  • Learn the fundamentals of the programming language.
  • Build programs with common core components like functions and tables.
  • Test and debug your code to verify and improve its functionality.
  • Iterate and update code when changes are required.
  • Integrate user experiences and frontend frameworks.
  • Deploy smart contracts for further testing or into production.

Reference​

The Reference content area is where you'll find the information you most frequently need to look up. For example, the Reference content area contains the descriptions and examples for all of the Pact built-in functions. In general, reference information is organized alphabetically and easiest to find by using Search.

Coding projects​

The Coding projects content area provides instructional material for working with the sample projects located in the pact-coding-projects repository. The topics that correspond with the sample projects illustrate concepts in action and complement explanation topics with hands-on exercises and coding challenges. The projects themselves highlight common use cases that can be adapted to many scenarios or extended to address new use cases.