Attendees: James, Matt, Christian, KarlRoche, Timothy Boldt, Rob Allen, Olivier Tardieu, Brendan McAdams, Daniel Krook, Nick Mitchell, Duy Nguyen, Dave Grove, Carlos, Jeremias, Markus, Lorna, Kalonji, Vadim, Martin, Priti Desai, Jason Peterson, Vincent Hou, Kerry Chang
Notes:
  • James Thomas moderating
  • Pirate competition begins… Carlos’ "Jack Sparrow" equalled by James’ “Redbeard” (something British)?
  • known topics for today:
    • Brendan from RedHat, use cases
    • Nick on Composer
    • Runtimes discussions
Introductions of attendees
  • James: I am a dev. advocate in IBM Cloud, presenting and writing JS lib for OW
  • Brendan McAdams: 
    • with RedHat as of Sept. focus on impoving OW, from Lightbend (akka and scala), involved with Akka from beginning, here to help apply my experience to improve project.  Have been talking to Rodric in areas that I can help with.
  • Timothy Boldt
    • joined GE digital, in April 2017 prior to that 4 years in Google cloud storage.  Currently, working on our serverless efforts. within the Cloud eng. team
  • Kalonji
    •  IBM emerg. tech team, worked on some automation scripts (VMs) for deployment.  
  • Priti Desai
    • with ibm for 2 years, and on OW for 1 year, working on wskdeploy tool primarily
  • Tardieu
    • IBM research, working on Composer within the last year
Open comments on status 
  • Main/core OpenWhisk
    • James: any notable changes happening on dev stream? 5 mins or so?
    • Markus: batching for activation records
      • Vincent replacing CLI tests to use REST interface instead, enables movement of CLI out of main repo. moving forward well (helps with resources)
      • Tyson and I completing LogStore interface, allows
      • also Kamon is in for metric streaming should be working
      • Dave Grove helped move from Redis to ookepper for Invoker ID assignment
    • Carlos: runtime update… Java got a small feature to allow name of class and method
      • more repo. changes.  Moves should finally be done (runtimes to their own repos with Travis CI/CD and DockerHub push as discussed last meeting).
      • Swift 3 update work started
  • Brendan: updates on plans for Akka/Scala or other parts of OW
    • Scala “don't use mutable vars” is mantra, EXCEPT in Akka
      • looking at now, at JSON parsing serialize/deserialize with CouchDB (around activations /packages) lots there to handle this transformation.
      • Looking if there is a better way to transform some record to an object and back (for better efficiency)
      • worked on Scala driver for MongoDB so have experience there
      • just want to help; please reach out to me for help
    • Looking at Akka clustering, to see if we can improve and keep an eye on that part of the code
    • Carlos: would be great to help with Scala training? is there a way to put together some videos on how to setup dev. env.? 
      • many on my team and larger community likely needs help in Scala; even writing Scala tests is hard as putting together a dev. environment “makes people cry”
    • Brendan: yeah, i experienced this as well
      • happy to educate on topics; just let me know what to prepare
    • James: really good suggestion; writing Scala tests is indeed challenging
  • Composer tool for orch. OW actions, in open source (Nick/Olivier)
    • Olivier: intro. the tool at Serverlessconf NYC
      • should be a video from the conf. “soon”
      • goal: we have functions, but to do “bigger” or “more interesting” things we need to compose them in larger logic patterns
      • goal: make easy to visualize flow of data and logic (e.g., IF-THEN-ELSE, TRY-CATCH error, etc.) through Serverless functions
        • Also, a data-forwarding construct (to push data around parallel paths in logic)
      • impl. as a NodeJS lib: const composer = require(’@ibm-functions/composer’)
      • Some TODOs: 
        • integrate APIs as functions
        • Compose in any lang. e.g., Java, Python, etc.
        • Managed control flow state (where am I in the composition?)
      • another goal is to allow a developer to use their favorite IDE (and run/test locally)
    • Nick: any questions?
      • other aspects to tooling, for edit/debug cycle, we have provided a means to visualize the compositions and the flow of data.
      • <shows open source repo> for “shell” on GitHub (IBM/ibm-functions/shell) with Apache license
      • has TravisCI and Codecov enabled with daily cron (to test on latest OW codebase)
      • PR to build averages 15 mins, need help improving codecov
      • Shows visualizer that has flexible ext. points, via plug-ins (able to register other commands)
        • Command resolver, plug-in manager
      • code is there now and eager to help
    • James: if people want to play with it directly via Github or as an NPM for the shell (if you just want to consume the composer)
    • Nick: @ibm-functions/shell
      • also @ibm-functions/composer if you want to work on the composer (write your own layers on top for example)
  • Carlos: on NodeJS 8 and Swift 4 updates
    • for NodeJS8
      • reviews his outstanding PRs, discusses goals and reviews initial set of chosen packages included
      • new feature of node8 is async/await (using async key on function main)
        • can try-catch a function that has been “promisify’ed”
        • different than writing older sync code
    • Carlos: wants each runtime to have a changelog as text file in repo. 
  • James: NodeJS 8 should bring us a new set of devs. making things easier to code.
  • James: Swift 4 now has feature called “codeable”
  • Carlos: yes, a PR is now open for Swift 4 as well, built upon Docker swift4 Ubuntu runtime; tried it and was surprised it worked “out-of the-box”.
    • James added an issue to add package(s) to make the runtime more consumable.
    • working to have “main" function take an input with a “Codeable" (struct)
      • goal: to handle either “main” signature (i.e., Codeable or not)
    • there are issues since the underlying runtime is built on Python, needs some investigation to improve efficiency/latency
  • James: have personally received feedback to improve Swift support and support Swift4
Confirm moderator for next call (i.e., Wed. Nov 8th)
  • Rob Allen volunteers.  with Revised date of the 29th.
  • James: Rob must get into pirate theme (challenge)
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