Aion has just done a marketing push making out that it’s the “first” blockchain for the Java programming language \u2014 in some sense that’s not entirely clear from the coverage,\u00a0e.g.<\/em>, the Coindesk headline<\/a> “Aion Network Launches First Blockchain Virtual Machine on Java”.<\/p>\n It’s nothing of the sort, of course. But then, what is it?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Java is a programming language that’s popular in enterprise environments \u2014 it’s a bit bureaucratic, but it makes it somewhat easier to code things in a correct and maintainable manner. (My day job is as a sysadmin to Java programmers.)<\/p>\n Aion’s smart contract engine, the Aion Virtual Machine, has been rewritten from C++ to Java. Aion posted about why they wanted a Java-based virtual machine in November 2018,<\/a> and they put the new Java-based AVM live<\/a> a few days ago.<\/p>\n Aion’s precise claim<\/a> (archive<\/a>), from their blog post announcing the move, is:<\/p>\n the world\u2019s first JVM-compliant Blockchain virtual machine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s possible you could twist shades of meaning of the words in that phrase to be true \u2014 but in any reasonable and obvious sense, it’s just false.<\/p>\n Implementing a simple blockchain in Java is a standard developer introduction to blockchains. So that bit’s not new. Nor is implementing your smart contract virtual machine in Java.<\/a><\/p>\n But nobody cares about your platform’s back-end \u2014 they care what they can do with it. Aion’s big promise here is that you can finally<\/i> write blockchain smart contracts in Java!<\/p>\n This is not new in any way \u2014 R3 Corda<\/a> and Hyperledger<\/a> both do smart contracts in Java just fine. They’re enterprise \u2014 of course they’re going to do Java. R3\u2019s implementation is built in Kotlin, a close cousin of Java that also runs on the JVM.<\/p>\n Matthew Spoke, founder of Aion, tells TechCrunch<\/a> (headline: “Aion Network introduces first blockchain virtual machine for Java developers”):<\/p>\n Blockchains have a set of unique criteria. They need to be deterministic; the computing needs to happen across the distributed network of nodes; and the JVM was never designed with this in mind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Aion is publicising their Java thing as if nobody ever did this before \u2014 let alone the two biggest enterprise blockchains.<\/p>\n As far as I can work out, Aion’s magic<\/a> to make Java into a smart contract language is:<\/p>\n I asked a Java expert about Aion’s claims \u2014 Ben Evans,<\/a> who is principal engineer and JVM architect at New Relic,<\/a> co-wrote Optimizing Java<\/i> (UK<\/a>, US<\/a>) and Java in a Nutshell <\/i>(UK<\/a>, US<\/a>) for O’Reilly, and is an editor<\/a> for Java-heavy programmer’s magazine InfoQ.<\/a><\/p>\n Evans says: “For a decent enough low-level JVM engineer, it’s a clean and somewhat obvious architectural approach.”<\/p>\n In fact, it’s sufficiently obvious that Evans pointed me to a video<\/a> in which he talks about how and why you would run smart contracts on the JVM \u2014 and sets out, step by step, how to make a Java program provably deterministic, as Spoke tries to take credit for \u2014 in 2017, when he was working on this exact problem for R3 Corda. (Here’s the InfoQ article.<\/a>) This covers a lot of the specific technical ideas that Aion are proudly claiming credit for in 2019. It’s a good and very clear video, well worth an hour of your time.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/aion-logo.png\"){kind=logo}
<\/a><\/p>\nAion and Java: first to be second or third<\/h3>\n
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