Migration of fabric-ca-client package to be included in fabric-gateway

[juannavasNexplore]

As a hyperledger developer, I am migrating to the HLF v2.5 version, then I see the SDKs for v2.2 are deprecated, specifically the fabric-ca-client states in its npm registry page (https://www.npmjs.com/package/fabric-ca-client):
" Note: This API is deprecated as of Fabric v2.5. When developing applications for Hyperledger Fabric v2.4 and later, you should use the Fabric Gateway client API."

However, the fabric-gateway client api currently does not include the fabric-ca-client functionality.

Our application is making use of the fabric-ca-client package, so I would need it to be ported to the fabric-gateway package, if fabric-ca-client is deprecated and eventually removed.

I would appreciate if you can share any rough time plan, or provide alternatives.

Thanks!

[bestbeforetoday]

The Fabric Gateway client API (similar to the fabric-network package that preceded it) focuses only on enabling client business applications to invoke (evaluate and submit) transactions, and receive chaincode and block events. It intentionally omits capability for administrative operations, such as chaincode deployment, channel creation, or identity registration / enrolment.

For administrative tasks, there are a few potential options:

• Use the Fabric CLI commands.
• If deploying to Kubernetes, a Kubernetes operator designed for managing Fabric might provide the capability you need. Two alternatives that I know of are Hyperledger Fabric Operator and fabric-operator.
• Continue using the existing fabric-ca-client. While it is no longer actively developed, the Fabric CA is pretty stable in its capability so this client API should continue to work.
• Use the REST API of the Fabric CA directly with your own client. I don't know of any documentation of the API, but the fabric-ca-client implementation just interacts with the Fabric CA using HTTP requests. You could inspect the implementation (or perhaps the unit tests to identify the correct HTTP request structure.

For chaincode deployment and channel management, there is a pretty complete Golang implementation in the fabric-admin-sdk repository. That repository also contains a Node admin implementation (based on code developed here) with code to interact with the CA. I am not sure how stable and/or functional the Node implementation is.

[bestbeforetoday]

Since this will not be implemented but the information might be useful to other people, I am converting to a discussion.