Welcome to AElf's official documentation. This Gitbook is where we centralize our guides, documents and api references. Weither you're a dApp developper looking to build some awesome apps on top of AElf or simply just interested in seeing what a running node looks like, this place is for you!
As of today the documentation is correct but still in progress so we invite you to frequently visit and discover any new content.
If you've never run a node before, we invite you to go through the "Getting started" section. It will give you the necessary basic knowledge and a few commands to run a node.
AElfs main objective is to permit scalability and extensibility through a multi-layer branching structure formed by a main chain and multiple levels of side-chains (a tree like structure). Each side-chain will be designed for one business use case.
AElf also aims to make it as easy as possible to extend/customize the system by providing easy to use tools and frameworks in order to customize the chains and write smart contracts. AElf will support various languages that will let developers choose the one they are the most comfortable with.
AElf will improve overall blockchain performance by executing transactions in parallel and isolating smart contracts in their own side-chains in order to segregate the systems resources.
In the Getting started section we start by describing the prerequisites to run an AElf node and a quickstart guide to show you the the interaction between our command line tool and the node.
The smart contract section will introduce our smart contract system and give you the required knowledge to start developping dApps on AElf.
Finally we have a more complete API references for the Command Line Interface, the js-sdk and the nodes RPC interface.
You can find the original whitepaper here. It will give you a more thorough explanation on the concepts that drive AElf and its developpement.
Of course, there's the official GitHub here and the js-sdk repo here.