Hi folks, I hope you are safe and had lovely "parties" during the last week of December.
2021 was a pleasant year for Apache Wayang(Incubating); we first released. We grow the numbers of "stars" in Github. We get new people contributing. Obviously, we want the same for 2022; many of you contacted me to chat about the future of Wayang; I collected your ideas, and with all of them, we created the following roadmap. In the chat, most of you pointed out that Wayang needs refactoring to support different elements in plug and play mode. The main reason for this point is to smoothly incorporate the new optimizers, new "internal workflows" that will help support Stream processing. During the coming weeks, we will share with you the design of the modifications where we can have a long discussion on where to start over this vital feature. It is not news that we have some issues with Travis in long waiting times to run the compilation and validation of the code. However, during the 2021 @CalvinKirs helps set up the first Github action to validate the licenses on the files, creating a new opportunity that we want to explore that incorporates the Github Actions in the daily workflow Wayang. Nevertheless, we want also to contribute to the apache community with the creation of automatization that could help other projects, for example, when you generate a 'TODO' in the code, this automatically creates the issue in Github and/or Jira to help with the visibility of the missing components. On the other hand, we need to start working on the weak points of Wayang. The current missing elements that Wayang has are the documentation and the coverage of the unitary tests. For the documentation, the first plan is to bring the architecture and other descriptions that we have published in different papers and create from there the documentation. Still, in this opportunity, we need to extend it as much as possible and make straightforward explanations, with good examples and precious insights for the new contributors and the adopters of the project. As the second part of the documentation, we will need to build several scripts that can help the user of Wayang make their installation and execution; the user just needs to care about the platform's usage. The unitary test has a lack in terms of coverage. One way of solving this problem could be to create a significant number of 'TODOs' explaining the test and the characteristics they need to increase the coverage. The new tests also help develop new functionalities to ensure that we are not broken code in future modifications. To solve the previous point, we will publish almost daily many issues related to it during the coming weeks, and we will request to hold some small-time windows of your time and work on it. So if each of us dedicates a short time to it, it will help narrow the gap that Wayang has. Suppose you arrive at this point asking where are the new plans and new features for Wayang. Of course, many of you are currently working in the Python API, SQL API and EMMA API; they are so important because they help in the inclusion of new communities and make the environment of Wayang more robust. However, one of the features that can enrich the user experiences will be running Wayang in a server mode, not just like a program of one run. Nevertheless, if you have an idea for a feature, please feel free to write an issue with the features, then we can discuss it in the thread. One last idea is to have Github issues and Jira as a mirror. This idea comes from the assumption that many developers are looking at the code; they are focusing on the Github repository; having the code and issues on the same platform may help with visibility and motivate someone. Also, having everything in the same place will be nice for some of you, as you commented to me. I hope this email was not boring for you, but there are many ideas and plans for Apache Wayang(Incubating). It wasn't easy to make it shorter, but if you have any comments or ideas, just reply to this email to discuss this topic that is relevant for the future of Wayang. Best regards, Bertty
