Welcome to the Election workshop

The Election application workshop consists of several self-paced tutorials with content and coding challenges to help you learn about how to build decentralized applications for the Kadena network using the Pact smart contract programming language and related tools.

The tutorials in the workshop will guide you to create an application website where Kadena community members can elect the new president of the fictional Kadena society.

In this application:

To ensure that the application can meet these requirements, every vote is executed as a transaction on a blockchain. The blockchain is the perfect vehicle for this application because it can ensure data integrity, authenticity, transparency, and privacy. However, transactions require computational resources and fees to be paid in exchange for the resources consumed to validate a block. To make the election application accessible to all community members for free, the election contract includes a special type of reserve account—called a gas station—that pays the fees for all voting transactions.

By completing the tutorials in this workshop, you’ll learn how to:

Some of the topics covered in this workshop are similar to topics introduced in the Quick start. For example, you’ll set up a development network (devnet) running on your local computer in a Docker container and sign transactions using public keys and Chainweaver accounts. However, the tutorials in the workshop also touch on additional topics such as:

To complete the tutorials in the workshop, you need to have some software installed on the computer you are using for your development environment. Each tutorial includes a "Before you begin" summary of what you'll need for that specific tutorial. As a preview before you start the workshop, you should check whether your development environment meets the following basic requirements:

If you have everything you need, let’s start building the election website by following the workshop roadmap to get started with Prepare your workspace.

This workshop consists of multiple tutorials that you should complete in order. Each tutorial provides some starter code and guides you to completing the tasks necessary to build the Election application to run on the Kadena blockchain.

For the first tutorial, you’ll clone a repository with a working front-end for the election application that stores candidates and votes in memory. After that, you’ll set up a local development network and your development workspace to begin building the blockchain back-end for the election website. The workshop repository contains branches with starter code for every tutorial, so you can compare your solution with the finished code at every step along the way.

Stay tuned for future editions of this workshop and for more intermediate and advanced tutorials covering additional topics, such as:

To suggest topics you’d like to see covered in future tutorials and workshops, submit a documentation request. If you'd like to contribute content—either in the form of a new tutorial or to fix issues—see our contributor's guide.