Ropsten is one of the various test Ethereum networks. It closely resembles the main network in terms of its transaction and mining structures. The difference is, of course, that none of the transactions or ether transferred in the Ropsten network are real. Think of Ropsten as a test environment.
When trying to ship to Ropsten, you are required to sync with the current state of the Ropsten blockchain. Unfortunately, this takes a long time with Geth. However, with Parity, we can achieve the same thing as part of a quicker and easier process.
Why not just use ganache-cli to test? ganache-cli is simply a framework to quickly and locally test your contract on a locally generated blockchain. It is ...
