Decentralized Applications

While it might be interesting to interact with our smart contracts using web3.js or Truffle tests, it's unlikely that this will attract many real-world users. In order for our application to be useful, it needs to have a user-friendly interface. That’s why, in this lesson, we'll learn how to build a web frontend for our smart contract. Using this web application, users will be able to get the current state of an auction and interact with it, for example, by sending bids to it.

Application's architecture

What we'll build in this chapter is called a decentralized application (dapp). We’ve already seen an example of a dapp in the first chapter when we were using the Ethereum Name Service application. Now, we'll see how to implement one ourselves.

The major difference between a dapp and a regular application is that, in the latter, all data is stored in a centralized database (or multiple data stores) owned by a particular organization. To do anything with this data, a web application running in a browser sends requests to servers providing the application’s functionality.