Given the ongoing promotion of scripts over bytecode in TinkerPop 4, I think now is a good time to review construction and configuration of traversal strategies from the GLVs. There was a brief exchange on this topic between Valentyn and Stephen in the bytecode removal PR (https://github.com/apache/tinkerpop/pull/2661#discussion_r1658803214) which I wanted to follow-up on and give my own thoughts. My view is that the primary goals of any changes to strategy construction in TinkerPop 4 should be simplification for users, and consistency across gremlin language implementations (gremlin-lang vs gremlin-groovy) and GLVs. I agree that all strategies should be added to the registry, and we should add feature tests for all strategies. I also agree with the suggestion to adapt TraversalStrategyProxy as a mechanism for the driver to construct and pass custom registered strategies, and that something equivalent to TraversalStrategyProxy should be introduced to all the GLVs. However, I currently disagree with deprecating the concrete strategy classes in the GLVs, as I believe they still serve a useful purpose as a discoverability aid in the drivers. Retaining the concrete classes will also keep the GLV traversal syntax closer to gremlin-lang and gremlin-groovy syntax. I can see how some may argue that the gained simplicity of having a single mechanism for strategy construction in the drivers outweighs the discoverability of the concrete classes. I would be interested to hear any opinions on this. I’m considering renaming TraversalStrategyProxy as part of these changes. Please reach out if you have any suggestions here. One final change I would like to propose is the removal of all usages of FQCN’s (fully qualified class names) for strategies in the GLVs in favour of simple strategy/class names. The FQCN ties gremlin too close to Java in my opinion, and the simple class names are sufficient as long as the strategy is registered for gremlin-lang or imported for gremlin-groovy. Please let me know if you have any thoughts regarding strategies going forward. I plan to start adding the feature tests and fixing and related issues right away. Depending on feedback, I intend to begin adapting TraversalStrategyProxy as mentioned above and extending this capability to the GLVs in about a week. Thanks, Cole
