Corda 3.3 is now available!

Corda 3.3 is now available!

Corda 3.3 is now available, the artifacts can be found on Artifactory, with the code, as ever, on GitHub.

We’re shipping Corda 3.3 with almost one hundred bug fixes and enhancements. That’s 10 times as many (almost) as both previous releases (3.1 and 3.2), making for a truly polished experience. In addition, for the first time, we’re delivering back-ports of community contributions because it’s important you see your code moved into production where it can help both you and the whole community

Get it here, update your CorDapps… this is a good one!

The Numbers

I think the best way to sum up Corda 3.3 is with a few numbers

Corda 3.1 contained roughly 8 fixes

Corda 3.2 contained around 12 fixes

Corda 3.3 contains over 90 fixes

On top of those back-ported fixes we’ve also pulled back over 11 contributions from the Corda open source community . That, I think, we can all agree is a lot of extra goodness stirred into the pot. If Corda 3.0 was the rice… Corda 3.3 really is the flavor.

Community Contributions

We value people’s time, that someone would spend theirs to make Corda better by contributing fixes to the code or documentation; they’re a star!

We, the maintainers, were not doing a good enough job of back-porting contributions onto the release branch. We heard the complaints, listened, and have (eventually!) now taken action. The majority of the issues surrounded how code is committed and pulled backwards onto released branches, how that process was tracked and managed, and how people like me get visibility of things. Essentially, we have a process that works really well for those living it every day, but for someone not doing so it would be insane to expect them to adopt or try to follow, so we now have adopted a commitment, via the Developer Relations team, to triage community contributions and back-port them ourselves…. If it’s invisible to you, we’re doing our jobs.

PKI (Public Key Infrastructure)

Amongst those 90 fixes, the most significant revolve around the changes to the way Corda interacts with PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) hierarchies. After consultation, collaboration, and discussion with industry experts, the decision was made to change the default Certificate Hierarchy (PKI) utilized by Corda and the Corda Network. This has required Corda’s certificate path verification logic to be made much more flexible.

However, all existing certificate hierarchy, certificates, and networks will remain valid. Simply the possibility now exists for nodes to recognize a deeper certificate chain and thus Compatibility Zone operators can deploy and adhere to the PKI standards they expect and are comfortable with.

What’s that coming over the hill?

It isn’t a monster… what it is, if you listen carefully, is the thundering hoof beats of Corda 4 rushing toward us.

Oh yes! Coming this winter Corda 4 will be here, delivering a new major version of the Corda API along with some exciting new features such as Reference States and a completely re-written and improved State Machine that remains fully compatible with the current one — it’s just a *lot* better!

Whilst the final form and time isn’t locked down, everyone is working incredibly hard to deliver the next true milestone in the Corda story. We’re really excited for it, it’s going to be great and deliver just a whole lot more Corda.

Why Backport

For those avant-garde and courageous souls, the master branch of Corda exists with its experimental features, non backward compatible brand new APIs, and preparations for the future, alongside the occasional dragon or two. Master is a fun and exciting place to be: it’s where Corda is driven forward and everything discussed first realized.

However, the reality for those deploying production software is of course very different, which is why we feel not abandoning stabilized releases is a truly important service for the community. It would be easy to ship only a few bug fixes and turn all our attention to the future, maybe even focusing only on “paying customers”, as some have unfairly sometimes suggested! That is not what we’re about, not what Corda is about, and would be a massive disservice to our enthusiastic and diverse community. Thus Corda 3.3 delivers a great many fixes to help those who need a stable but polished experience, who need a few issues fixed, yet cannot move to the unstable world of Master.

Thanks for reading — Kat Baker, Open Source Release Manager (R3)