Introdution
Warning
Avian Flight Plans is still a heavy work-in-progress and any info stated is subject to change. Flight plans are not available for use on mainnet, only on testnet.
What are Avian Flight Plans?
Note
Avian Flight Plans can compared as smart contracts but are NOT the same thing. Avian Flight Plans is a scripting frontend for RPC methods.
Users of the Avian Network can create assets and decide their purpose and rules independent of the protocol. To further leverage and automate the use of assets, flight plans can be used to assist in this task. Flight plans allow the users to design their own protocol according to their needs, allowing further control over assets. Assets themselves alone can be transferred, minted, etc. We want to further unlock the capabilities of assets by developing a smart contract system to allow developers to have greater control and automation over assets. Although RPC commands exist for token management, a scripting language will allow more control and help with readability as opposed to using multiple RPC methods.
Basic example
Flight plan code (test.lua)
Note
Avian Flight Plans are written in the Lua programming language.
To learn more about the avian object, refer to Avian Lib ↗
-- Function to get random block
function rnd_hash()
height = math.random(1, 3000)
return avian.blockchain.getblockhash(height)
end
-- Print time of random block
function info_hash()
block = json.decode(avian.blockchain.getblock(rnd_hash()))
time = os.date("%x", block.time)
return "Result: " .. time
end
Calling function using RPC
RPC
Since Avian Flight Plans can called using the RPC, this allows flight plans to be called from any programming language that supports Bitcoin RPC. We will use avian-cli for this example.
avian-cli call_flightplan test info_hash
Output
Result: 01/15/2022