Hyperledger Iroha, originally developed by Hyperledger member company Soramitsu was inspired by Fabric’s architecture. The goal of Iroha is to provide a development environment for C++, web, and mobile application developers to contribute to the Hyperledger Project.
Iroha was created in order to complement such projects as Fabric, Sawtooth Lake and any future ones through the creation of reusable components in C++. This means Iroha is an addition to existing projects and its long-term mission is to produce an extensive library of reusable components that can be used by anyone who is running a distributed ledger on Hyperledger technology.
Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger said “Iroha allows even more developers to interact with Hyperledger to build infrastructural projects and applications requiring distributed ledger technology” and added that it “is encouraging to see member companies actively contributing to a diverse and sustainable open source blockchain ecosystem built on cooperation.”
Wherever possible, Iroha’s creators made the APIs similar to those of Fabric, and they are also alike in that blockchain and chain code services comprise the architecture. However, Iroha is not intended to compete with Fabric, and its goals are to:
Provide an environment for C++ developers to contribute to Hyperledger.
Provide infrastructure for web and mobile application support.
Provide a framework to experiment with new APIs and consensus algorithms which may be added to Fabric in the future.
With the addition of Iroha, the applications of the Hyperledger Project continue to grow and gain features which allow developers to make greater use of distributed ledger technology. Its developers have plans to develop Iroha even further, and will soon be making support for iOS and Android available to developers.