Before we dive into our Interbit platform example, let’s take a step back and define the ecosystem of Interbit applications. We are concerned with two types of apps: Interbit platform apps, and apps built on the platform.
By platform apps, we mean apps intended to make Interbit app development easier by solving common problems, such as user identity management, payment processing, and hosting. These apps make up the Interbit platform. They may not provide much value to the user on their own — after all, how useful is a payment processing app if there is nothing to pay for? However, they allow developers to concentrate their efforts on solving app-specific problems instead of reinventing the wheel.
Apps of the second type of are those built by developers that use the functionality provided by the platform.
The following example includes a platform app called the Accounts app,
packages/app-account — providing user authentication and identity
management functionality — and a Template app,
packages/interbit-template — a simple starting point for creating
your own Interbit apps.
The goal of this example is to demonstrate how to request and share user profile information from outside the Accounts app. To achieve this goal, we cover:
-
How to configure the platform and Template app so that a user can grant read access to their private accounts chain from the Template app.
-
How to create a user account that is authenticated via GitHub so that the user has a private accounts chain to share.
Specifically, we:
-
Give an overview of the platform structure by:
-
describing how the apps' chain joins and peers are configured,
-
describing the chain hosting for our apps and the GitHub OAuth flow with the
packages/platform-deployandpackages/web-auth-endpointhypervisors.
-
-
Give instructions on how to run the example locally.
-
Give a walk-through of the accounts and templates apps' user interfaces to create an account, and authorize profile information sharing.
The example is divided into the following topics: