matreyes
Hi everyone!.
In 3 years working with Elixir, my only frustration has been (as you may expect for a small community) the lack of “client” libraries (libraries that connects to other services, that have to keep the timing of changes or versions of the connected service). We usually don’t have official client libraries for other services, as they are not interested in a small community.
Usually someone creates the client, but the effort of maintaining something which is changing all the time is too much for one person.
I have seen this problem with SqlServer and Azure SQL (TDS / Ecto), Kafka, Azure Storage and Cassandra to mention some of them.
Contributing sometime is possible (I have sent some PRs), but sometimes the maintainer does not have enough time to review your PR, or simply, I don’t have the brain to be able to contribute.
I would love to personally sponsor some of these projects, but none of them offer Github sponsorship.
The Erlang Foundation have an External Process Communication Working Group. But I’m not sure if they are addressing this issue.
¿What do you think we could do to address this issue?
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thomas.fortes
In my opinion codegen is the way to go, as you said, maintaining a client lib against a target that is changing all the time is a ton of effort for a single person, which means that most of the time we just hook up a small wrapper with the needed methods for our project, it works pretty well for a single project, but is tightly coupled and makes no sense to release it since it will be useless outside of a very small and well defined scope.
A couple weeks ago @wojtekmach created this proof of concept, and I think that expanding on his ideas could be a nice starting point.
https://forum.elixirforum.com/t/lets-try-to-get-officially-supported-elixir-libraries-for-stripe-braintree-and-paddle/37924/42?u=thomas.fortes
matreyes
That is a great approach, but I don’t believe it’s generalizable.
For example Brod and Kafka_ex uses code generation techniques for the Kafka Protocol, but all the behaviour (for producing and consuming messages) has a ton of work behind. Erlkaf just uses the NIF for librdkafka, and works great, but then we depend on C libraries.
Then TDS has a well implemented binary protocol, but now they have to handle SSL, Active Directory, etc.. a ton of work again.
I was thinking more on how founding these projects.
dimitarvp
I also stand behind code generation – it’s the best way to go if we want to cover a lot of surface with limited amount of humans behind keyboards to support the projects.
If the protocol has an OpenAPI machine-readable file then a lot of the work can be done by the computer and not by the human.
Failing that – or in addition to that – and if the service is SaaS and if it has a sandbox environment (loads of “if”-s, I’ll admit that) then an integration testing suite running once a week that asserts that the endpoints are still there and are working as expected is a reasonable compromise. I’ve done it in the past with other languages.
Last Post!
matreyes
I was thinking on data clients (databases, queues and file systems like sqlserver, cassandra, kafka, couchdb, foundationdb, hdfs etc..) . Some of them could use a odbc driver, but in most cases we have to implement the binary protocol, and sometimes they delegate a lot of logic into the client.