Ethcode

Inspiration

When Polygon launched in 2017 that brought a great revolution in the Blockchain industry Polygon solved many issues that the blockchain community faced like scalability, transaction gas cost etc. This gave us the inspiration to solve the problems faced by the Blockchain community. We really want to solve problems by heart and this leads us to the idea of creating Ethcode - a smart contract testing and deployment solution with no code where blockchain developers can test and deploy their smart contracts with no code.

What it does

Ethcode is a tool for Blockchain Application Developers, Smart Contract Developers and Blockchain Application Administrators.

It solves the problem of smart contract manual testing, repetitive tasks for smart contract development and execution of smart contract calls for dApp administrators.

Ethcode works with all commonly available RPC endpoints (EVM only). Users can add RPC networks in vscode extension settings.
Deploy Smart Contracts on any EVM supported network which has a standard RPC endpoint.
Users are able to select among different networks from a dropdown.
Ethcode can load Compiled JSON outputs from Hardhat and Remix.
Call mutable functions with required parameters.
Call immutable functions with or without parameters.
Supports local EVM nodes (Ganache & Hardhat or any other Ethereum nodes).

How we built it

Ethcode is a Visual Studio Code Extension. It uses the vscode Extension API with Typescript.

Ethcode was initially built with the grant support from Ethereum Foundation and Remix IDE. Our team is also working to bring the full support of Remix IDE into vscode and be able to use the advantages of various Remix IDE tools into vscode along with Ethcode and other commonly available tools for smart contract development.

Challenges we ran into

Our goal from the beginning was to make Ethcode faster and more reliable. Previous versions of Ethcode also had some UI-related features, which made our solution slower and buggy. As a result, we eliminated the UI and re-created a new version of Ethcode that was faster than previous versions. On our current version, we are completely switched to native vscode extension APIs and native vscode UI components which were not available in the previous vscode releases. Currently, developers are provided with key combinations to execute almost all the actions they need to load smart contract compiled outputs and carry out all the required functionalities to deploy and execute the smart contracts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Ethcode was the first extension that provided an ethereum execution interface for developers using vscode to build their smart contracts.

Ethcode provides a complete set of vscode commands that can be used for a full smart contract development lifecycle.

Apart from smart contract developers, dApp frontend developers and dApp administrators often need to execute smart contract calls, and they use etherscan for that. Now they can use vscode and JSON files to execute such calls much faster.