Web3.js in the Ethereum ecosystem

Dale Carnegie, the famous self-improvement trainer, said that financial success is due to 15 percent technical skill, the remaining 85 percent being due to the ability to express ideas and arouse enthusiasm among people. Blockchain might be a cutting-edge technology backed by sound computing principles, but to make it a financial success we need to have mass adoption among people. For this, we need an interface to which everyone can relate.

Web3.js is one technology that can help us in this area of concern. Web3.js provides JavaScript bindings to Ethereum, which can then be used to build intuitive user interfaces using the web stack.

Figure 7.1: Web3.js interacting with a private blockchain via geth

It provides an abstraction to hide the complex internal works of smart contracts on the blockchain. In simple words, a web application implemented in JavaScript communicates with an Ethereum node or transacts with a smart contract on the blockchain using the Web3...