Platform Library

The BigLedger platform is published as a set of versioned Java libraries. Your application declares them as dependencies, gains every BigLedger capability, and adds your own logic beside it — without holding a copy of BigLedger source code.

This is not the REST API. If you want to integrate an existing system with BigLedger over HTTP, use the API Reference or an SDK instead. The platform library is for teams building a backend application that runs as a BigLedger deployment with extra behaviour of their own.

What you get

Getting Started

Get access, add the dependency, and run your first build

Building Your Application

Add endpoints and services, and boot the platform

Versioning & Upgrades

How releases are numbered and how to move between them

Troubleshooting

Common errors and current limitations

The libraries

Three artifacts are published under the com.bigledger group. They are released together and always share a version number.

Artifact	Contains
`akaun-api`	The application layer — REST controllers, endpoint handling, request authentication, background queues
`javasdk`	The platform core — domain services, units of work, the data access layer, tenancy, permissions
`client-sdk`	Shared value types — table classes, containers, query criteria, DTOs

akaun-api depends on javasdk, which depends on client-sdk, so a single declaration brings in the whole platform.

How it works

Your application is a standard Spring Boot project. It declares the BigLedger libraries as dependencies and registers BigLedger’s application class as a Spring source. At startup, your application serves every BigLedger endpoint, plus every endpoint you have written yourself, against the same databases, the same authentication, and the same tenant model.

Because BigLedger arrives as a compiled dependency rather than a branch of source code, upgrading is a version change. There is no merge, and no BigLedger file in your repository that could conflict with an upgrade.

What you can build today

New REST endpoints alongside the standard BigLedger API
New services, scheduled work, and integrations that reuse BigLedger’s domain layer
New tables and data belonging to your application
Composition of existing BigLedger services — call the same services the standard endpoints call, and wrap them in logic of your own

Changing the behaviour of existing BigLedger endpoints is not supported in the current release. Published extension points for altering built-in behaviour are on the roadmap. If your requirement depends on this, talk to your BigLedger contact before designing around it — see Building Your Application.

Requirements

Requirement	Version
Java	17
Build tool	Gradle 8.x (recommended) or Maven
Spring Boot	3.2.5
Database	PostgreSQL, provisioned by BigLedger
Access	A GitHub account with read access to the BigLedger packages