%0 Journal Article 
%A Rosa Bilbao, Jesús
%A Boubeta Puig, Juan
%A Rutle, Adrian
%T EDALoCo: Enhancing the accessibility of blockchains through a low-code approach to the development of event-driven applications for smart contract management (Abstract)
%D 2023
%U http://hdl.handle.net/10498/36252
%X Blockchain is a cutting-edge technology based on a distributed, secure and immutable ledger that facilitates the registration of transactions and the traceability of tangible and intangible assets without requiring central governance. The agreements between the nodes participating in a blockchain network are defined through smart contracts. However, the compilation, deployment, interaction and monitoring of these smart contracts is a barrier compromising the accessibility of blockchains by non-expert developers. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a low-code approach, called EDALoCo, that facilitates the development of event-driven applications for smart contract management. These
applications make blockchain more accessible for software developers who are non-experts in this technology as these can be modeled through graphical flows, which specify the communications between data producers, data processors and data consumers. Specifically, we have enhanced the open-source Node-RED low-code platform with blockchain technology, giving support for the creation of user-friendly and lightweight eventdriven applications that can compile and deploy smart contracts in a
particular blockchain. Additionally, this platform extension allows users to interact with and monitor the smart contracts already deployed in a blockchain network, hiding the implementation details from non-experts in blockchain. This approach was successfully applied to a case study of COVID-19 vaccines to monitor and obtain the temperatures to which these vaccines are continuously exposed, to process them and then to store them in a blockchain network with the aim of making them immutable and traceable to any user. As a conclusion, our approach enables the integration of blockchain with the low-code paradigm, simplifying the development of lightweight event-driven applications for smart contract
management. The approach comprises a novel open-source solution that makes data security, immutability and traceability more accessible to software developers who are non-blockchain experts.
%K Low-code
%K Smart contract
%K Blockchain
%K Event-driven application
%~ Universidad de Cádiz