Summary
"The Accord Project is “a non-profit, collaborative, initiative developing an ecosystem and open source tools for smart legal contracts.” Now a part of The Linux Foundation, the project is developing and maintaining a collection of several related standards, software libraries and software components useful for building hybrid smart contracts – contracts that are both human and machine readable and allow for computerized execution, including on common public and private blockchains.
<u>There are four primary software components of the project :</u>
- Cicero – a templating language based on markdown and mustache templates.
- Ergo – a scripting language that lets you describe contract logic and variables.
- Concerto – a JavaScript schema language for contract-related data models.
- Template Studio – a React-based GUI to view, edit and test smart contract templates. It also includes a series of reusable React components that can be used in other applications."
Screenshots
The Cicero template language is dead simple to use and powerful. It has limited formatting options, however.
Cicero is based on Markdown, a lightweight markup language meant to easily create formatted text using plain text files. It’s a format that has many advantages – namely its small size, universal compatibility and compatibility with common version control systems like git. One of the downsides of Markdown, however, is it does not offer as many formatting options as something like Microsoft Word, which attorneys may find limiting (there is limited built-in table support, for example).
The Accord Project has built a series of tools and components to work with their templates, data models and logic files.
The Accord Project has built several different ways to work with their smart contract standard:
- Template Studio – lets you edit Cicero templates, Concerto data models and Ergo logic files. It’s built in the excellent React frontend framework.
- VS Code Plugin – lets you work with all of the Accord Project file types and template archives directly from VS Code, the popular open source IDE.
- Template Library – allows users to load and share templates from a single repository.
The Accord Project has spent a lot of time developing sample content and examples, in addition to developing tools to share and view these.
The Accord Project also has a fairly extensive library of simple hybrid smart contract clauses and even entire contracts. These can be loaded in their template studio or VS Code plugin. You can experiment with different template and logic inputs to see what the human language looks like fully rendered or what the embedded computer logic will do with certain inputs.