Team, With all of the excellent work that many have contributed to NiFi over the years, the code base has also accumulated some amount of technical debt. A handful of components have been marked as deprecated, and some components remain in the code base to support integration with old versions of various products. Following the principles of semantic versioning, introducing a major release would provide the opportunity to remove these deprecated and unsupported components.
Rather than focusing the next major release on new features, what do you think about focusing on technical debt removal? This approach would not make for the most interesting release, but it provides the opportunity to clean up elements that involve breaking changes. Focusing on technical debt, at least three primary goals come to mind for the next major release: 1. Removal of deprecated and unmaintained components 2. Require Java 11 as the minimum supported version 3. Transition internal date and time handling to JSR 310 java.time components *Removing Deprecated Components* Removing support for older and deprecated components provides a great opportunity to improve the overall security posture when it comes to maintaining dependencies. The OWASP dependency plugin report currently generates 50 MB of HTML for questionable dependencies, many of which are related to old versions of various libraries. As a starting point, here are a handful of components and extension modules that could be targeted for removal in a major version: - PostHTTP and GetHTTP - ListenLumberjack and the entire nifi-lumberjack-bundle - ListenBeats and the entire nifi-beats-bundle - Elasticsearch 5 components - Hive 1 and 2 components *Requiring Java 11* Java 8 is now over seven years old, and NiFi has supported general compatibility with Java 11 for several years. NiFi 1.14.0 incorporated internal improvements specifically related to TLS 1.3, which allowed closing out the long-running Java 11 compatibility epic NIFI-5174. Making Java 11 the minimum required version provides the opportunity to address any lingering edge cases and put NiFi in a better position to support current Java versions. *JSR 310 for Date and Time Handling* Without making the scope too broad, transitioning internal date and time handling to use DateTimeFormatter instead of SimpleDateFormat would provide a number of advantages. The Java Time components provide much better clarity when it comes to handling localized date and time representations, and also avoid the inherent confusion of java.sql.Date extending java.util.Date. Many internal components, specifically Record-oriented processors and services, rely on date parsing, leading to confusion and various workarounds. The pattern formats of SimpleDateFormat and DateTimeFormatter are very similar, but there are a few subtle differences. Making this transition would provide a much better foundation going forward. *Conclusion* Thanks for giving this proposal some consideration. Many of you have been developing NiFi for years and I look forward to your feedback. I would be glad to put together a more formalized recommendation on Confluence and write up Jira epics if this general approach sounds agreeable to the community. Regards, David Handermann
