Concepts: Dna and Zomes

TLDR: each DNA creates its own DHT network, whose ID is the hash of its source code.

DNA

DNAs are one of the most important building blocks in Holochain. Simply put, a DNA is the source-code for the game you are playing with your peers in Holochain.

And here is the twist: in Holochain, every DNA creates its own peer-to-peer DHT network. This makes it so that you are agreeing to the rules of the game before actually joining the network and beginning to play with peers. This is going to be key for validation rules.

One of the most important characteristics of a DNA is that it's identified by the hash of the source-code. It follows that if you change something from that code and install that DNA again, you are literally creating a new network.

You can also create some entries in one DNA and switch back and forth DNAs to realise that when you create a new network, none of the data is ported.

Zomes

DNAs in Holochain are composed out of multiple zomes. Zomes are like modules: you can compose them together to aggregate its functionality.

These are examples for different zomes:

• Roles zome
• Blogging zome
• File storage zome
• Currency zome
• Calendar zome
• Content management zome
• Index/filtering zome

And from this list we could group different zomes together to make different happs:

• Meetup clone:
  • Calendar zome
  • Communities zome
  • Currency zome
  • Roles zome
• Wikipedia clone:
  • Roles zome
  • Content management zome
  • Index/filtering zome
• Twitter clone:
  • Blogging zome
  • File storage zome

You can start to see how zomes can add a lot of composability to Holochain's functionalities.

Declarations

Each zome has to declare:

• Zome functions: these are the functions that can be executed from outside Holochain (the UI of a web app, for example).
• Entry types: the kinds of entries that this zome is going to create in its zome functions.
• Validation rules: the rules by which the entry types of this zome are valid or not.

Constraints

These are the constraints by which zomes are to play with each other:

• Each zome can see the entries committed by any other zome, both in the DHT and in the source chain.
• Each zome is responsible for validating the entries and links it creates.
• Zomes can call functions from one another.
• A zome can attach links to entries created from other zomes.