Blockchains are systems for multi-master state machine replication. ABCI is an interface that defines the boundary between the replication engine (the blockchain), and the state machine (the application). Using a socket protocol, a consensus engine running in one process can manage an application state running in another.
Previously, the ABCI was referred to as TMSP.
The community has provided a number of addtional implementations, see the Tendermint Ecosystem
To get up and running quickly, see the getting started guide along with the abci-cli documentation which will go through the examples found in the examples directory.
A detailed description of the ABCI methods and message types is contained in:
To compile the protobuf file, run (from the root of the repo):
make protoc_abci
See protoc --help
and the Protocol Buffers site
for details on compiling for other languages. Note we also include a GRPC
service definition.