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Web3j Core Modules

To provide greater flexibility for developers wishing to work with web3j, the project is made up of a number of modules.

In dependency order, they are as follows:

  • utils - Minimal set of utility classes
  • rlp - Recursive Length Prefix (RLP) encoders
  • abi - Application Binary Interface (ABI) encoders
  • crypto - cryptographic library for transaction signing and key/wallet management in Ethereum
  • tuples - Simple tuples library
  • core - Much like the previous web3j core artifact without the code generators
  • codegen - code generators
  • console - command-line tools

The below modules only depend on the core module.

  • geth - Geth specific JSON-RPC module
  • parity - OpenEthereum specific JSON-RPC module
  • infura - Infura specific HTTP header support
  • contracts - Support for specific EIP's (Ethereum Improvement Proposals)
  • besu - Support for private transactions on Hyperledger Besu

For most use cases (interacting with the network and smart contracts) the core module should be all you need. The dependencies of the core module are very granular and only likely to be of use if your project is focussed on a very specific interaction with the Ethereum network (such as ABI/RLP encoding, transaction signing but not submission, etc).

All modules are published to both Maven Central and Bintray, with the published artifact names using the names listed above, i.e.:

For Java:

org.web3j: <module-name\> : <version\>

For Android:

org.web3j: <module-name\> : <version\>-android

Further details

In the Java build:

  • Web3j provides type safe access to all responses. Optional or null responses are wrapped in Java's Optional type.
  • Asynchronous requests are wrapped in a Java CompletableFutures. Web3j provides a wrapper around all async requests to ensure that any exceptions during execution will be captured rather then silently discarded. This is due to the lack of support in CompletableFutures for checked exceptions, which are often rethrown as unchecked exception causing problems with detection. See the Async.run() and its associated test for details.

In both the Java and Android builds:

  • Quantity payload types are returned as BigIntegers. For simple results, you can obtain the quantity as a String via Response.getResult().
  • It's also possible to include the raw JSON payload in responses via the includeRawResponse parameter, present in the HttpService and IpcService classes.