| description |
|---|
The easiest way to connect your application to Abacus |
To send and receive interchain messages, your application will need to be aware of the Abacus contract addresses. Inheriting from AbacusConnectionClient is the easiest way to manage these pointers.
Before diving into AbacusConnectionClient, first let's zoom out, and take a look at AbacusConnectionManager, an out-of-the-box solution for managing Abacus contract addresses.
AbacusConnectionManager is an Ownable contract that manages pointers to the Abacus Outbox and Inbox contracts, which can be updated by the owner.
When sending interchain messages, applications can query an AbacusConnectionManager for the address of the Abacus Outbox. Similarly, when receiving interchain messages, applications can query an AbacusConnectionManager in order to validate that the message was sent via Abacus.
You might ask, why use an AbacusConnectionManager when you can instead hardcode contract addresses in your contract's constructor?
Over time, we expect a number of incremental improvements to the Abacus protocol, some of which may necessitate a new deployment of the protocol, despite remaining API compatible from the perspective of application developers.
Using an AbacusConnectionManager allows applications to migrate to a new Abacus deployment with just a few transactions.
AbacusConnectionClient is a simple mix-in contract that application developers can inherit from in order to connect to Abacus.
This contract maintains a pointer to an AbacusConnectionManager. Application developers can choose to deploy their own connection manager, or point to an existing contract that's managed by an entity they trust.
AbacusConnectionClient exposes functions that allow subclasses to easily query the AbacusConnectionManager for the addresses of the Abacus contracts that it is currently connected to.