The Hyperledger Fabric maintainers are pleased to announce the availability of Fabric v2.4.0-alpha!

Hyperledger Fabric v2.4.0-alpha introduces the new Fabric Gateway feature as a technology preview.

The Fabric Gateway is a new feature in the peer that implements much of the high-level 'gateway' programming model that has been found in the recent Fabric SDKs. Much of the transaction submission and query logic can therefore be removed from client applications and delegated to the peer. For example your client application only needs to communicate with your organization's peer(s), and the gateway running in the peer will handle the collection of transaction endorsements required from other organization's peers.

The Fabric Gateway will also simplify the administrative overhead of running a Fabric network because client applications will be able to connect and submit transactions via a single network port rather than requiring ports to be opened from a client application to multiple peers across potentially multiple organizations.

New slim SDKs are delivered in the https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric-gateway repository, along with client application samples and a sample network. Try it out by cloning the fabric-gateway repository and following the instructions at https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric-gateway/tree/main/samples.

You can also see the feature as presented in the last contributor meeting playback:
https://wiki.hyperledger.org/download/attachments/41590443/20210331_contributors_meeting.mp4?api=v2

Let us know your thoughts as we continue to work on the gateway feature for an eventual v2.4 release.

Other details of the v2.4.0-alpha release can be found in the release notes:
https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric/releases/tag/v2.4.0-alpha